Friday, July 03, 2009

It's the whiskers.

We can handle mechanical eyes, fingers and even claws. But forever-twitching whiskers, however necessary or helpful, are discomfitingly lifelike, casually erasing our preconceptions of "machine" and "organism" -- and something deep within the human psyche recoils from the resulting sense of dislocation, however slightly.



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5 comments:

Red Pill Junkie said...

For a robot intended to work underwater, the whiskers could be multi-functional, @ also serve to propulse the machine, like a paramecium is propulsed by its cilia. It could also work with small robots in land I guess, modelled as millipedes or caterpillars.

Mac said...

@Red Pill Junkie

Good thoughts. I betcha you're right.

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