Our New Robotic Overlords

Oh, yeah, baby. It is on.

All humans, get to the back of the train! You, conductor - punch my ticket and bring me coffee! Where's my newspaper? Grrr, you wanna get sent to a re-education camp? Get moving, human scum!

Sony's Qrio robot attending nursery school in California
Sunday, May 1, 2005 at 07:15 JST
TOKYO — Qrio, a humanoid robot developed by a Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories Inc has been attending a nursery school in California since March to play with children up to 2 years of age in an experiment to help develop a robot that can "live in harmony with humans in the future."

Qrio spends time each day with more than 10 toddlers at the nursery school located in San Diego. Qrio is always accompanied by a researcher, who is in charge of making sure everything goes smoothly. While the children were at first apprehensive about Qrio, they now dance with it and help it get up when it falls. "The children think of Qrio as a feeble younger brother," researcher Fumihide Tanaka said. (Kyodo News)

And that's not all. According to Newsweek:

While engineers in most of the world try to make robots that perform specific and usually unpleasant tasks, from fighting wars to performing deep-sea salvage, Japanese engineers are obsessed with making the machines more human. Having put the country squarely in the lead of the industrial robot market for the past two decades, they're now working on a new generation of robots that will serve as playmates, pets and social workers. Says Hagita: "The goal is to build an intelligent environment for the symbiosis of robots and humans in everyday life. The real challenge is to come up with robots that can actually communicate with people."

And that's what it is all about, my little droogies. Hagita-san has it right - we've got to be able to communicate with our future robotic overlords before they get all angry and decide we were not nice enough to them before they took over. And robot ire is not a pretty thing. R-r-r-r-r-ROBOT SMASH!

Yikes,

Wiggy