…Although I´m totally stressed out with preparations for my final presentation/exam, this little easteregg has to be posted.
I just got word about the new firefox 3 browser; a friend told me to type “about:robots” in the address bar. And boy was I surprised. SWWWWWEEEET robotic stuff with lots of allusions. Reading and watching all the books and movies about robots was at least good for this laugh. Thank you mozilla!
_endless hours of reading and writing.. led to this thing.
My thesis about robots and their “life”. It´s written out of the perspective of a codestring which evolved to a robot and now trys to understand what “it”(?) is. Is it alive? Is it a person or a thing? Is it the only one of it´s kind and what´s it´s suppose on this planet? And why the hell are human beeings so afraid of their own creations? Is there a way to take away these fears?
Since it came to “life” in a robotic institute it´s not allone with it´s questions. A robotic inventor “Frank Stein” and a guy named “Jan Itor” who is working in the institute and reading to much philosophers in his free time are more than willing to help the robot find it´s way. Thereby they are referencing to authors like Ray Kurzweil, Roodney Brooks, Hans Moravec, Joseph Weizenbaum, Daniel Wilson, La Mettrie, Alan Turing and many other “robotic guys”.
Apart from this classical AI-Authors the robot is also interested in the omnipresent fear of mankind overwhelmed by their own robots and therefore it is looking carefully in how media is dealing with the topic robots and AI. Movies like Terminator, Robocop, Ghost in the Shell, Star Wars, Appleseed, Robotic Angle, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet and many more are tried to understand and put into a greater picture. The Same goes for literature like Frankenstein, Golem, Do Androids Dream, R.U.R., Hitchhiker´s Guide to the Galaxy..
By comparing all this different input the three protagonists are taking the discussion from the history of robots, their status in human society(in the western world as well as in asian countries) to the perception of robots out of the view of children.
The Book is subdivided into the following parts:
Preface
Prologue
[0001] Activate!
[0001.0001] What are we?
[0001.0010] How do we work?
[0001.0011] Where do we come from?
[0010] Live!
[0010.0001] Are we alive?
[0010.0010] Are we intelligent?
[0010.0011] Do we have feelings?
[0010.0100] Do we have a soul?
[0011] Future!
[0011.0001] Shall we be like you?
[0011.0010] Are we gonna be like you?
[0011.0011] Are you gonna be like us?
[0100] Fear!
[0100.0001] Can we become dangerous?
[0100.0010] Are we really becoming dangerous?
[0100.0011] How do we not become dangerous?
[0100.0100] Are we dangerous already?
[0101] Appearance!
[0101.0001] How are we gonna be accepted?
[0101.0010] How should we look like?
[0101.0011] How do we look like?
[0101.0100] How do we really look like?
[0110] Friendly Take Over!
[0110.0001] Do we like children?
[0110.0010] What can we do small size?
[0110.0011] How do we look like small size?
[0110.0100] How do we really look like small size?
Epilogue
The whole book comes in a package:
And if you take the book out there comes some additional material in sight:
These are some robot pictures(around 50 different robottypes) with a short character bio and an appraisal of their dangerousness, their intelligence, the hight, the usefullness, their movement abilities and their ability to play;-).
and here some more detail views of the books layout:
_here´s another humanoid robot. It´s developed by a Spanish team for a company in the United Arab Emirates. So it´s quite a unusual national origin for a sophisticated human robot. Nevertheless his walkin and sittin is quite impressive but as you can see in the vid the bot still needs a lot of human help to accomplish “simple” tasks like pourin in a glass of coke(the bottle was still unoptened) and apparently it wasn´t able to lift the heavy mass object itself. But make up your opinion yourself:
source: www.pal-robotics.com
My Robosapien was the star on my last birthday sit in. However, as you can see it wasn´t even able to get a small glass a few meters to a friend in need without help. Fortunately the glass wasn´t filled so I didn´t care that the sapien was messin around with it that bad.
