Robo-Fear

Why is nobody really fearful of robots anymore? It seems like only yesteryear that we’d go to the cinema to watch seemingly to us, horror films, about robots like the Terminator. On the written writ, Isaac Asimov was spending a very sizable amount of time wondering about the line between man and machine, both where and whether it could be drawn. The whole percepted concept of the uncanny supposedly pinning much of hominid phobia, was described—at the term’s tracing in 1906 by psychologist Ernst Jentsch—as “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might be, in fact, animate.”

But that already irrational fear of robots has suddenly dispersed from our mind’s gaze. Robots in movies are now too concentrated on looking for love or overcoming their downfalls in a much exaggerated robotic world. Great bearded intellectuals are no longer tracing up and down on an animatronic display for days looking for some reason for being. Even the average layman isn’t contemplating robots taking up his current job, or surely not anytime soon, for he’s presently more worried about outsourcing to countries like Bangladesh and Beirut. It’s not that we’ve all of a sudden become more rational defectively evolved primates; we just don’t seem to have that urgency to repent before robots anymore.

We’re reading and listening with a new verbosity towards reports of the EATR (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), which can live unaided on a battlefield by the seeking and eating of organic material, particularly when Robert Finkelstein, the president of Robotic Technology, assures the public the EATR is mostly vegetarian. We have robot vacuum cleaners lounging around our homes whilst never thinking of them as eavesdroppers or fidelities. Most intriguing, we wonder and drool at the inventions of robotics mastermind David Hanson, with his cyborgs that excrete confusion of whether what we are seeing belongs to us or to them, is a “you” or an “it”?

Hanson has repeatedly croaked that the shocking verisimilitude of his creations is in the service of allowing us to relate to them. The balm applied to this irrational position is to make really emotive robots. If his robots share a defining feature, it may be likability. Hanson’s robots add weight to the argument that to let robots become part of society is to make them real looking, non-animatronic, non-freaky.

One wonders, though. If your goal is not freaking people out, why would one refer to the substance coating your robots as “flesh rubber” and then abbreviate it to the even more sinister Frubber? If your goal is not freaking people out, why would one circulate footage of your humanoid creations in labs programmed with quasi-medicated serenity, such creepily upbeat robo-sentiments as “I’m having a very pleasant day” or “While I’m primitive now, I am evolving.” If Freudian concepts are the discourse of choice, one wonders if the uncanny might be less of a choice for the conscious level of interpretational advances. For a Hanson, who is answerably on a mission to keep people calm around robots sure seems as though he's unconsciously trying to creep people out.

But it is not working; we still are reverent towards the robots. The ever so delusional Churchmen aren’t defacing and denouncing Hanson as a heretic and a god-playing villain destined for an eternity in hellfire. Villagers aren’t picketing his house. H’m, but why not? What became of that robotic phobia? You could argue that the tremendous technological leaps forward of the last few decades, coupled with the gargantuan advancements in convenience coming from the constant increasing fluxes in technology, took away our technologically inspired fear and left us with a taste for more. Speaking of more, I doubt even Moore’s law might not be enough to attend to this appetite. The robotic changes that are still to come into being for us are well beyond the average man’s imagination. This has been said very frequently and if you take the internet as a sterling example I’m sure we’ll be good. When it comes to facing massive technological paradigm shifts that render our society unrecognizable, it may be that the Internet has left us in a daring and expansive mode of reference and pensivity, like explorers at a remote tribal banquet, riddled with relief at having quite enjoyed the first raucous course of seemingly raw slabs of indistinguishable rawhide meat. We’re hungry though, well I am.

Dell Inspiron 15

Processor: Intel Pentium Dual Core T4500 (2.3Ghz/800MHz/1MB cache). Today it is fairly universal that a modern processor will make use of the following method: fetch, decode, execute and write-back. The faster the processor the better but an average processor of today’s standards is good for my course.

Operating System: Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit. You can get quicker access to all of your stuff. Easily create and share movies, create great looking movies and slideshows, and share them on YouTube in minutes. Manage open windows more easily: size and arrange windows by simply dragging their borders to the edges of your screen. Instantly expand to full screen and back, or arrange two windows side by side, simply by dragging their borders to the edge of your screen. Do more and wait less: improvements that can accelerate sleep and resume and make your PC more responsive and help you get more done. Share files and printers among multiple PCs: from one Windows 7-based PC to another. Don't leave programs behind: run many Windows XP productivity programs in Windows XP Mode. Stay entertained effortlessly, with Windows Media Centre you get one place to enjoy your photos and music.

Memory: 2GB DDR2 at 800MHz. The computer will run sufficiently well with this memory for my course work.

Hard Drive: 250GB SAT Hard Drive (5400RPM). This is more than enough hard drive space for all four years of my course.

Internal Optical Drive: 8X CD/DVD Burner (Dual layer DVD +/- R Drive).

Bluetooth: Dell Wireless 365 Bluetooth Internal (2.1) for Windows 7 Operating System. Perfect for public internet access and on campus access intranet access.

Service Plan: 3 Year Basic Service Plan.                                                                               

Microsoft Office: Home and Student 2010. Essential for my studies in my course.

Security: McAfee Security Center for 36 months.

Adobe: Adobe Photoshop CS5 11^th Edition.

Colour: By Choice. Fashion these days, you know.

Ascending to the Stars on a Beam of Light

Look at a typical rocket and you’ll see a typical bottom heavy cone with mountains of fuel at the bottom tracing near the tiny payload at the top. That inefficiency is the main reason why it mounts to about $10,000 per pound to get a satellite into the outer orbit. It is also why a radical group of researchers are investigating an extremely inventive alternative that could loft objects into space far more cheaply—using lasers instead of chemicals.

Recently closed work by aerospace engineer Franklin Mead Jr. of the Air Force Research Laboratory and physicist Eric Davis of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, Texas, describes this “light craft propulsion.” Their technique aims a high-powered laser beam upward at a small, low-mass craft. Their brilliant theoretic idea to blast a beam of light upwards at a lightweight, aerodynamic craft and, mathematically possible, during take-off, the laser causes air at the base of the craft to explode into a jet of hot plasma, generating thrust. Beyond the reach of our little pale blue dot's atmosphere, the laser continues to aim at the craft’s underbelly, heating a propellant material that lines its bottom. Engineer Mead has experimented with small-scale models to fine tune the directional basis and momentum continuum of light propulsion, and physicist Davis has investigated the efficiency of the laser. The two researchers highly regard that their design could get satellites into low Earth orbit for around $1,400 per pound. “Not carrying the whole energy source on board reduces the cost to a fraction of what we’re used to paying,” Davis says.

Although no craft at all has yet made it into space, one prototype—designed by Leik Myrabo, an engineering physicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—successfully flew 233 feet into the air under laser power. Physicist Myrabo says he could increase the height existentially by up-winding to a wider and more powerful beam of light. But reaching orbit will require huge megawatt lasers; so far, the best commercial lasers used in experiments have less than 10% of that power. Military lasers might have the might, but they are difficult to access for civilian acquirement in research. Myrabo is now joining up with the Brazilian Air Force on efforts to boost laser power in tests at the Institute for Advanced Studies in São José dos Campos, Brazil.

This article is very interesting to me because (1) I have an avid interest in astrophysics and space science (2) this is a huge technological leap for space exploration in many ways including; cost factors, distance, and astronomical advancements, and (3) the cheaper the cost for space travel, theoretically, the more we can travel into space. I think that space discovery is very important to us -as humans- for a larger understanding of why we exist. For isn’t this the ultimate question: “Why are we here?” To the detriment of the human race we have been bogged down for two millennia by the super-natural consensus that something more than we can imagine created us. Despite the fact that this mode of thinking is contradictory; it has no evidence what so ever, none. This is the age of science, reason and technology. These three tried and tested modes of thinking in the natural world are the way forward and with these we are ever closer to that ultimate answer. Or will we ever know?

Blog: Psychology of Technology

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10 simple things to make your blog better

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