First up, from the far, far east….
(TSUKUBA, Japan) A new walking, talking robot from Japan has a female face that can smile and has trimmed down to 43 kilograms (95 pounds) to make a debut at a fashion show. But it still hasn’t cleared safety standards required to share the catwalk with human models.
Developers at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, a government-backed organization, said their “cybernetic human,” shown Monday, wasn’t ready to help with daily chores or work side by side with people — as many hope robots will be able to do in the future.
“Technologically, it hasn’t reached that level,” said Hirohisa Hirukawa, one of the robot’s developers. “Even as a fashion model, people in the industry told us she was short and had a rather ordinary figure.”
[full story]
Interesting stuff for the second and third generation human-like robots. Give us another generation of robotics engineers, looking at art like this, and we’ll be there for sure.
That artist, BTW, is Choe U-Ram, and you can see one of his nightmares in motion here.
I have another video that’s yet to be online about this stuff. Quite frankly, I think it would be very bad for humanity if we were to create an AI. I know that’s the dream of a lot of computer scientists and robotics experts, but there is the potential, nay the certainty, of calamity along that path. Any sufficiently advanced AI (i.e. one that qualified is all respects as a “mind”) is going to have the capacity, as we do, to ignore any and all constraints placed upon it by the outside world. Such is the nature of consciousness.
In that line of thinking, providing an intelligence with the vast power that could come from a body of steel and and effectively infinite life, and one is well on down the road to madness. And, unfortunately, for a real AI, madness *must* be an option. So as much as I love the robots, and the cool stuff we can make nowadays, there needs to be a rather firm limit on what kind of power we are going to give them, as they will certainly want to take more…if we make them anything like us.
Robot Pirate Ninja 