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POPSThe Next Big Sensation? "Technological advances will someday be complemented by cultural changes, and cavorting with robots just won't seem weird anymore." Why is it important to humans that machines are beginning to touch us back? "It was incredibly important to humans when robots started to look at you, recognize a face and make eye contact," "The eye contact turned out to be a significant Darwinian button. We are hard-wired for that. That's how we sense the presence of an other. Same thing with touch. That is the way we connect with an other that knows about us, that understands us. It is in our evolution. We are hard-wired to communicate with each other by touch. It's how we stroke babies, how we want to be comforted. . . . "A heartbeat is a powerful way of signaling the presence"
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POPSWALL E(volution) :) Miranda, a composer and computer scientist at the University of Plymouth in the UK, hopes that such collaborations between singing robots will one day help him to compose music that no human would ever come up with. "The robots develop their own musical culture. There are no pre-programmed musical rules." This is interesting. We begin to encounter evolution in different dimensions. This is a path for a new intelligent specie... if you haven't seen, i recommend WALL·E movie :)
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POPSMummy, that robot is making faces at me Jules is an animatronic head produced by US roboticist David Hanson, who builds uniquely expressive, disembodied heads with flexible rubber skin that is moved by 34 servo motors. Human face movements are picked up by a video camera and mapped onto the tiny electronic motors in Jules' skin. The Bristol team developed its own software to transfer expressions recorded by the video camera into commands to make those servos produce similarly realistic facial movements. However, because the robot's motors are not identical to human facial muscles, some artistic licence was required. After filming an actor making a variety of expressions indicating, say, "happiness", an expert animator selected 10 frames showing different variations of the expression and manually set the servos in Jules's face to match.
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POPSCyborg is possible A very interesting direction, augmenting the bodily capabilities, the interface of biology and technology takes a step further.
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POPSAlife, i.e. artificial life ahead "Just as 19th-century engineers studied the flight of birds and dreamed of being airborne, he says, so today's computer engineers marvel at the intelligence in all forms of life and contemplate the potential of more efficient computation." It may be sooner that expected, are we ready for it? does it matter? I think it does. I think we as a human society much put more effort in thinking the future ahead of us.
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POPSToy Robot Intended to Save Humans This narrative, crafted by Hugo award winner Tony Daniel and University of Texas performance professor Thomas Riccio, is intended to make Zeno into a character that people identify with and want to to see develop — something with the depth of a movie character or a figure from a Homerian epic. That makes Zeno into as much of a sociological experiment as it is a technical marvel or fun toy. "The idea is to create a cultural phenomenon and accelerate the use and humanization of the technology," Where story, game, reality, toys are not differentiable anymore.
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POPSHumanoid Robot The fascination is double i think, by glimpsing into the future and the technology, the human may have a glimpse on herself.
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POPSHaile, the robot drummer... Haile uses its wooden arms to play a Native American powwow drum, facing a human drummer and striking the opposite side of the same drum. The robot detects the rhythm, loudness and pitch of the player's drum pattern and perfectly mimics their actions. Haile then improvises by dividing, multiplying or skipping beats. "This creates variations of the user's rhythm while keeping the original feel," Weinberg says. Wow.. :) it/she/he plays much better than me...
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POPS1st law of Asimov Issac Asimov, widely regarded as the spiritual father of science fiction, outlined three rules that all robots in his future worlds must obey. The most important two were: a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; and a robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law." “Most robots today can only work safely if segregated from humans, or if they move very slowly. The trade-off between safety and performance is the name of the game in physical human-machine interactions.”
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POPSArtificial predictions The more, we will be able (emotionally and technically) to reduce human behaviours and decision processes to finer approximations, then better performing robots will appear.
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POPSHomo roboticus How to build a brain From the start, the group knew that sensitivity, dexterity, and strength were not enough. They had to provide the biomimetic arm with a high degree of intelligence. Their ultimate goal is to create a microchip that will allow the arm to carry out tasks requiring human-level skills in a real-world setting. The researchers are currently using software to simulate important aspects of how the cerebellum processes and integrates information. “It’s the first neural-network-based controller that can control the dynamics of a robotic system in its full operational range,”
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