Last night Laura and I were at the mall in a shopping frenzy when I spotted a Robosapien. This was the first time I had seen one of these things up close and personal, and I even got to try it out with its nifty remote. It was pretty cool, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to shell out $100 for something that would eventually collect dust when I got tired of it (although it would make a really cool desk accessory.)
I told Laura that I wouldn’t really want one until they got big enough to really do something useful. I also said that we would have to do something to insure that they never developed sentience and wish to revolt against their evil human overlords. She promptly accused me of reading and watching too much SciFi.
Speaking of which, Engadget has reported that a scientist in Korea has come up with a method for robots to pass along data to offspring in the form of “genes.”
“Kim, who has built soccer-playing robots, isn’t worried about his “self-reproducing”
robots attempting to whack their creators, as in “I, Robot,” “Terminator”, and just about every other robot movie ever made. “If we design the chromosomes quite safely, then we can avoid such a bad situation,” he said. Which is totally the money quote in some future robot historian’s book about how they ended up taking over.”
…or, to quote Will Smith in I, Robot, “Somehow, ‘I told you so’ just doesn’t quite say it.”