robots

There is such a thing as a robot camel jockey

/ Shane / 1 Comment

My friends. Ohhhh my friends. What a wonderful, wonderful world we live in.

Did you know that somewhere in the world, possibly right at this moment, robots are racing camels? It’s true.

Apparently, the wildly popular sport of camel racing had just a teensy bit of a dark side:

Camel racing has been around for thousands of years. “The Sport of Sheiks” almost exclusively utilized small children, usually boys around the age of four, to ride and direct the camels. Often, the boys would be starved to be as light as possible. Many of the boys used for the races were often sold to race organizers or camel owners, and there was an active child slave trade for camel jockeys, involving victims of kidnapping or the children of destitute families who sold them into servitude.

Yeaaaaah. Whoops.

The elegant solution? Robots. Ranging from the realistic:

To the simplistic:

Not only do the robots save the lives of these poor boys, it also allows the owners to take a more active role. If you’re going to drop the kind of cash it takes to enter into a competitive breeding and racing program, wouldn’t you rather be holding the remote control than just sitting on the sidelines watching?

What is it about robots riding camels that is so outrageously awesome? It’s like the sport of the future mixed with the sport of the past.

How is this not popular in the U.S.? How is it not televised?

WHY AM I NOT WATCHING IT RIGHT NOW??

Robot Orchestra

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I have seen one robot playing music, but I have not seen *many* robots playing music. And something so cool might as well be set to the James Bond theme, right?

 

Sure, you could have made a robotic synthesizer with speakers, or even one robot to play the music, but there is definitely something cooler about the fact that it is many robots coordinating together to make the music.

It is also frightening to see them working together like this. Definitely reminds me of the swarminoid. Sure, for now the robots just play music and get books off of shelves, but is it that hard to imagine them coordinating an attack on the human overlords, or the manufacture of additional robots of their own design? We’re swimming in dangerous waters my friends.

Link via Sylvain.

Robots continue to make great strides toward conquering the human race

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Alright, this video is pretty awesome, and also pretty frightening at the same time. Basically, three types of robots work together (a concept apparently known as a “swarminoid”) to find a book and retrieve it.

Tell me you can’t envision these things taking over the world?? There is something particularly creepy about the eyebots and the way they move.

On the other hand, I love how much information they communicate just by some color changing lights. You can tell when they find the book, you can see the information traveling from robot to robot, just by a change of color.

You can see a little more information here.

The Beginning of the End

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I try and I try to warn about the robot menace, but nobody listens to me. Every day some new story about robots getting smarter, scientists teaching them to stab people, etc. Quite frankly, I don’t know why the scientists even make them.

First off, the most dire news I have probably ever heard…a computer gave birth to a new life form. A computer actually created a DNA sequence, inserted it into an existing organism, and then got that organism to reproduce. This is the first time that someone (or something) was able to create a DNA sequence that was actually able to perpetuate itself.

Read that paragraph about 3 times and if you’re not too frightened to go on, let me tell you about this one. A robot actually performed a science experiment. That doesn’t sound scary until you consider what that means: a robot was able to perform a task, learn from its failure, modify the task and keep going until it got it right.

Did you buy some of that robot insurance I mentioned? Humans united against robots.

I firmly believe robots shouldn’t stab people

/ Shane / 3 Comments

But then again, I also believe you shouldn’t give them opportunities to do so.

You’re going to want to watch this all the way through until the end, to see a human getting stabbed by a robot.

As everybody knows, robots are always on the verge of taking over the world. There are countless hours of documentary footage proving this, such as The Matrix, The Terminator series, and I, Robot, just to name a few.

So I therefore have to question the logic of these people giving a knife to a robot in the first place. On the other hand, the mission to teach robots not to stab or cut people, is certainly a noble one. I think this code should instantly be included in ALL robotic programming. I mean ALL people; today’s Roomba is tomorrow’s robotic overlord. You say the Roomba doesn’t have access to any knives, and I say yet. The Roomba doesn’t have access to any knives, yet.