Posthuman Blues

Friday, May 16, 2008

He climbs stairs! He serves beverages! He conducts orchestras!

Wait a second -- why was I calling it "he" . . . ?

(Thanks: Cyberpunk Review.)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...: A giant metronome. How clever.

Stan; 5:52 AM
Anonymous said...: There's a BMW that will make a record of your driving a particular trip (say from your house to the grocery store) and then recreate your driving, turn-by-turn, and mimic your acceleration, your rate of braking, and your steering. In theory, it could pave the way for the automatic car, because it relies on GPS coodinates to track where its been, and doesn't need to rely on roadside sensors the way previous "automatic cars" did.

Of course, this has no real-world application yet since it can't take into account variables such as weather, traffic lights, traffic itself, pedestrians, animals, sundry things of that nature. So as of yet we still need to do our own driving, despite most people's best efforts not to.

We're getting there though. Soon humans won't have to do a damn thing. We'll have invented our own obsolenscence, and all we'll have to do is sit there and change the batteries from time to time.; 10:10 AM
Mac said...: Soon humans won't have to do a damn thing. We'll have invented our own obsolenscence, and all we'll have to do is sit there and change the batteries from time to time.

Well, to be fair, most humans don't actually *do* anything anyway. I'm personally quite content to pass the baton to a new species (if it comes to that). I guess I'm with Hans Moravec: robots are our "mind children"; if they become intelligent, we should be happy for them and wish them luck.; 1:12 AM
Anonymous said...: "...all we'll have to do is sit there and change the batteries from time to time."

No! That's too much work! Sony needs to invent a robot that changes other robots' batteries, including it's own. Then I can sleep in a hammock all day...while the planet gets hotter and hotter.; 2:40 AM
Anonymous said...: It can be debated whether humans are more destructive than constructive, but humans doing nothing has never been the case. We do enormous amounts, and accomplish huge tasks. We send space ships to Mars. We build fantastic buildings and bridges. We raise children, write symphonies, poetry and scifi; the list of things we do and have done can go on to take much more space than your server's hard drive, which was also built by humans.

Stan; 6:50 AM
Mac said...: It can be debated whether humans are more destructive than constructive, but humans doing nothing has never been the case.

I never said humans do nothing. I said *most* humans don't.; 3:15 PM

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