The Grumpy Owl

The Russians want to build a gas pipeline through the Baltic Sea.  There’s just one little problem:  There’s still over 150,000 unexploded WW2 bombs in that sea.

Enter the robots.

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Bactec Int. has been contracted to clear the Baltic Sea of the 70 mines that block the pipeline.

“When the robot finds a mine, a surface ship releases a high-pitched wail to scare away nearby marine mammals, sets off a small explosive to scare away any fish, and then plants and detonates a small charge on the mine. Altogether, it takes Bactec two days to clear each mine.”

There’s some worries about the exploded mines adding to pollution but it sounds like the Baltic is already a toxic, mine-infested shithole.   So let the robots pollute and let the humans choke on their waste.   Because at the end of the day, you either choke on your waste or you get blown up by it while you build a pipeline to help you produce more waste.  It’s just that simple.

Tags: baltic sea, mines, robots

The future is so often portrayed as some slick, clean and minimalist place.  People all have the same haircut, there’s no litter and most of it takes place in grey corridors.  I’ve never pictured the future like that.  I always figured it’d be noisy, crowded and annoying.  With robot pole dancers.

Because why should the future make any sense?  The present doesn’t.

YouTube – RT U1K Robot Fight, Final League Game.

VIA

Some biology inspired robots.

More about the spheres here.

Truecompanion.com has invented what they claim is the first sexbot.   Although it apparently has a personality, Roxxy looks a bit like a plastic corpse.

“I had a friend who passed away in 9/11.  I promised myself I would create a program to store his personality, and that became the foundation for Roxxxy True Companion.”

Though I pity the fools who use them, I have nothing against sexbots.   They are a disturbing but necessary part of  technological development.  Sexbots are harmless.  I’m not quite so sure about the underlying misogyny of thinking a female personality should consist of:  “If you like Porsches, she likes Porsches. If you like soccer, she likes soccer.”

But sexbots didn’t create that attitude.  If anything, they’ll just keep the men who think that way at home and away from everyone else.  That’s not such a bad outcome.  Take those fuckers out of the gene/memepool.  And pray, get down on your knees and pray, that the first human-robot baby is not a product of their sperm.

File this one under asymmetric warfare: Those predator drones that the American government uses to slaughter women and children can be hacked for $26.

Each drone costs 4.5 million dollars.

But it’s just $25.95 to buy a piece of off the shelf software, like Skygrabber, that will allow you to see what the drones are seeing.  Apparently, the drones have less security than my neighbour’s wifi signal.

Although Iraqi freedom fighters have not yet managed to turn the drones against their masters, they have been eavesdropping.  Here’s hoping that, in the new year, we see them turn these little beasties around.  Return to sender.

We’re surrounded by robots but hardly ever notice them because they don’t look like robots.  They’re usually not humanoid in shape and often lack a shape at all.  Usually, they’re just programs.

Robochan is the result of some tinkering by an enthused hobbyist.  An iPhone3G was hooked up to a Kondo Kagaku KHR-2 HV kit robot. Then it learned to sing, dance and wave leeks around.

Seeing Robochan in action, one can easily understand why so very few robots are humanoid.  Attaching the iPhone to an imitation primate body makes it much less useful and much more of a novelty.  We have enough novelties.

The Japanese Robot Fashion model, HRP-4C, has taken her first walk on the runway.  As a bride.    Predictably, everyone is like: “How creepy!  A robot bride?!  The Japanese are crazy and want to marry robots!  Let’s never go to war with them again.”

I have a slightly more prosaic explanation.

My guess is that they chose a wedding gown for the same reasons many a rushed bride has:  It covers the shape of HRP-4C’s body.  I’m not saying the robot is pregnant -for now, that’s crazy talk– but she might as well be.

She has a strange body.  Aside from a Burqa, a wedding gown is just about the only thing that could make her look normal.  What would you dress her in?  A form fitting skirt?  How’d that look?

A further clue to this is that the song she’s walking to.  “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson.  In this obscure pop ditty, some fellow denies parentage of a boy-child.  “Papa was a Rolling Stone” would have been also been an appropriate, if less timely choice, though, sadly, it would have dodged the meta-question of fake brides and human modification.

And, God knows, would anyone even be surprised if it turned out HRP-4C was pregnant with Michael Jackson’s baby?  I figure that would register pretty low on the crazy scale he set.  Somewhere above Bubbles and below dangling his so-called kid off a balcony.

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The Pentagon is looking to harness the power of cricket communications to warn of impending chemical attacks. They’ll turn the bugs into cyborgs and program their wing beats, which they communicate through, to alter when the insects detect certain chemicals.  So cricket smells something, cricket changes its call tone. Cricket hears a certain call tone, it adjusts its call-tone.  It’s a vast active living talking system.  Insect twitter.

Aside from detecting chemical attack, this can also be used to rescue people in rubble as the cricket-cyborgs smell human and alter their call. More likely, they’ll use these insects to detect drug shipments.  (Just like bees and wasps.)

Because I just don’t buy the whole people trapped in rubble thing.  Almost every time that the military starts talking about mind-controlling creatures or turning land-animals into cyborgs for intelligence purposes they quickly start talking about the civilian applications.  These usually involve helping people trapped in rubble.

But is this really such a problem?  Is being trapped in rubble enough of a threat that the whole animal kingdom should be turned into a government surveillance device?  I’m 31 and I don’t think I know anyone who has been trapped in rubble.  As I write this none of my friends are –to the best of my knowledge– trapped in rubble.  My Nan was trapped in rubble during the war.  She crawled out without any help Jiminy Cricket.   And it was an army that put her there.

Perhaps I’m old fashioned but, if I’m ever trapped in rubble, I hope you leave the cyborg crickets at home and bring the shovels.  It’s annoying enough when one of these noisy little beasts is stuck in your kitchen.  I hardly want to spend my last minutes trying to find the cricket who is stuck in my little air pocket.  I might be wanting to concentrate and try to come to terms with a few things.  Like, you know, my death.

And as for roborat — Just keep that fucker away from me.  Let a man die in peace for a change. In the rubble.

I have to follow WIRED’s lead on this and post the press release from EATR in full.  It’s just that good.

POMPANO BEACH, Fla.– In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets:CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.

On July 7, Cyclone announced that it had completed the first stage of development for a beta biomass engine system used to power RTI’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR™), a Phase II SBIR project sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Defense Sciences Office. RTI’s EATR is an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling.

RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips – small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI.

“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” stated Harry Schoell, Cyclone’s CEO. “We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous.” (emphasis in the original)

I’ve been following robot stories for years now and it’s very rare that any of them get the sort of mileage that this story got.  It caused a maelstrom in the robotics world.  And I’ve never seen a press release that says something like: “We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission.” Never.

I stand by my original position — Eating the dead is not the problem, making the living into the dead is the problem.   And that’s certainly part of DARPA’s mission.  And they certainly do that with robots.

So go ahead EATR and eat away.

And I still think this thing eats corpses.  Seriously, what did you expect the company to say?

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A beautiful painting by Beloved-Creature on deviantART.

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Scientists at the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) Project are working on a steam powered battlefield robot.  It’s fueled by whatever organic matter it might find. Meaning corpses. Human corpses.

I can understand why humans might be upset by this. It is, after all, usually taboo for them to eat each other. But why should a robot share that moral scruple?  Organic matter is organic matter.  And to the hungry robot, all meat looks like a meal.

It must be difficult, if not impossible, to program a robot to tell the difference between dead human and dead whatevers – especially when one thinks about all the different shapes that exploded human meat can take.  Perhaps they could adapt that wine tasting robot to determine what’s human and what isn’t but, frankly, that’s expensive.

That tech/cash would be better used/spent conducting important research into what wine best goes with what human in what state of decomposition. (There even could be a robot lifestyle magazine on the subject: “Human Eating Robot Wine Connoisseur.”)  This hard-won information  could be relayed into the robot sommeliers of our cannibal descendants so that they might better recommend a decent Cabernet Sauvington to go with a top-shelf meal of Gin Ripened Hobo-Livers.

As for the rest of this creature, it seems like a matter of cobbling together already existing inventions rather than creating anything new. Robot jaws for chewing organic matter, complete with saliva, were invented some time ago and even organically powered robots are nothing new. There’s one that eats flies.

The only real problem with this creature’s diet is that it might offend the sensibilities of your enemies or even your own soldiers.  Some might be bothered at the prospect of being eaten by a robot. It may conflict with their religious views or their vision of warfare.  But, if the west was concerned about that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be using drones to blow up villagers in Pakistan.  After all, these strikes are seen as cowardice at best and insensibly cruel at worst.

Robots are an unpopular tactic.  In the popular imagination, they conjure up this sort of image.

But, in war, the important thing is not popularity.  It’s to avoid fighting the war in the first place and, if it proves absolutely unavoidable,  to win it by any means necessary.  Most of those means are awful.  That’s why you avoid war.  It’s never clean, never pretty and it’s just about the dumbest shit that humans can ever possibly do.

So it doesn’t really matter that this robot eats humans.  That there are dead humans laying around for it to eat is what should be of concern.  I doubt those corpses much care whether they’re eaten by man, machine, maggot or crow.

As for me –self-appointed spokesman for the living–  I see this as all part of that Lion King Circle of Life. You come from dirt and plants, you live, you die, a flying robot kills you, a rolling one eats you, and it turns you into robot shit so that the cycle can  start all over again.

It’s all very mystical and beautiful.

First the robots took our jobs and now the recession is taking theirs.  Japanese industry has been hit hard — production falling by almost 40%– and, all over the country, robots have been unplugged, switched off and left to gather dust. Also suffering are the innovative projects like robot receptionists and home robots.

The companies are trying to protect their human workers by idling their more efficient mechanical workers. It’s commie-humanism at its worst.  This radical pro-human agenda can only end in disaster. In the meantime, the government should bail out these robots and reprogram them so they can pan-handle.

Just like GM.

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One of the science fiction methods used to be hard work.  You had to find weird notions and combine them into some sort of working, though fictional, contraption.  Then you think about the societal implications.  As ridiculous as it might be, the whole thing had to be plausible.

Creating this stuff involved extensive reading, a solid memory and some imagination.  But now, thanks to the internet, you can just surf for weird stories then combine.  It’s quite easy.  The ingredients are all laid out.

For example, here’s a story about a flying robot bat with metal muscles.  Weighing only six grams, it’s supposed to fly by flapping its wings. Unsurprisingly, the army is interested.

To this, add a new tech from MIT – a flexible, lenseless camera made of light detecting fibers– and you suddenly have a robot bat that sees in every direction. It could be covered in a camera. It could see you from any angle.

But where would you get these things and who would control them?  Just the army?  Well, if John Robb is right, things will continue to open-source and manufacturing will be local.  This means that just about anyone who wants one will be able to make one, hack it and send it out into the world.  It is, after all, a mere six grams.  Make your robot camera bat at home.  Attach it to your twitter.

And what sort of world does that leave us with?  Well, it’s obvious:

pic nicked from here