Where are the Robots Indeed?

I was thinking the other day, when work by human workers at Fukushima had to halt completely due to radiation levels, why the hell no robots were being used to continue work onsite. Seems I wasn’t the only one to think of this, and now even BoingBoing had picked up on it. I want to recall my recent post about robotics for a moment. If you look at the article above, the point is made that Japanese robotics research has lately involved building robots that do things like run marathons, play the saxophone– –and I’ll confess I’m not in principle against …

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Books and Covers?

I think it says a lot about us, and about our approach to robotics (and to AI, likely) that we coo and wow over how much robots can be made to look like us: Not that I think the verisimilitude would be easy, but folks, these things are profoundly not-us, and the more we try to hide that away, the more it will become apparent, and bother us. In the long run, all this investment of money into research and prototyping suggests that robots are thought to be useful in some kind of economic sense–not that they ought to have …

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