Ben Mathis-Lilley warns that recent potboiler novels about the security threat posed by China obscure the real threat from robots. I'm growing increasingly concerned about the nation's complacency on this point.
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The Real Threat
27 Mar 2008 08:38 am
Comments (9)
Who do you think is going to manufacture these robots? The Chinese! Well, they'll at least make all the plastic parts necessary for antropomorphising them, and that's where the danger lies.
Someone (Marc?) had a post about the Big Dog robot last week. The robots are already coming!!!
It'll make a change from the zombie metaphors, at least.
Just remember to buy Robot insurance from Old Glory...
It's later than you think:
Are We Giving Robots Too Much Power?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGxdgNJ_lZM
Matt would love being under the power of this robot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fZN5-kHETc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_1e989vcRw&feature=related
Actually, the robot threat is closer than you think...
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/products/Skynet5/index.html
Forecast: Sex and Marriage with Robots by 2050
By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience
http://www.livescience.com/technology/071012-robot-marriage.html
Humans could marry robots within the century. And consummate those vows.
"My forecast is that around 2050, the state of Massachusetts will be the first jurisdiction to legalize marriages with robots," artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands told LiveScience. Levy recently completed his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships, covering many of the privileges and practices that generally come with marriage as well as outside of it.
Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, "and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that's programmable too."
In 2006, Henrik Christensen, founder of the European Robotics Research Network, predicted that people will be having sex with robots within five years, and Levy thinks that's quite likely. There are companies that already sell realistic sex dolls, "and it's just a matter of adding some electronics to them to add some vibration," he said, or endowing the robots with a few audio responses. "That's fairly primitive in terms of robotics, but the technology is already there."
"Humans are very unusual creatures," Arkin said. "If you ask me if every human will want to marry a robot, my answer is probably not. But will there be a subset of people? There are people ready right now to marry sex toys."
If they look like this, I'm ready!
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/J_Skeleton/00696056.jpg
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/1401/1x08_08.jpg
Mathis-Lilley does Isaac Asimov an injustice. Asimov did not envision an 'inevitable apocalyptic battle against machines'. He criticized his predecessors for failing to produce alternatives to this cliche, and set out deliberately to do so himself.
Comments closed April 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
If you're that worried then read "How to Survive a Robot Uprising" by Daniel Wilson. It saved my life from my toaster one day.
Posted by Jordan Lawrence | March 27, 2008 9:16 AM