'You, Robot': Personal Robots for the Masses

[cali]

Along a winding dirt road, just west of the Lincoln Gap in Bristol, Vt., sit two big yellow houses on a sprawling property featuring ten solar panels, a dock overlooking a sunlit, trout-filled pond, and porches adorned with rocking chairs. In the smaller of the two houses lives Bina-48, one of the most renowned and highly sought after humanoid robots in America.

She (or "it," depending on your preference) is truly a sight to behold. She wasn't given a body; rather, she's a bust with an exceedingly human-like head, neck and shoulders, all modeled after a real woman named Bina Rothblatt. Her face looks quite real for a moment, until you get closer, and you discover it's not at all.

Her house also serves as the headquarters of the Terasem Movement Foundation, an organization dedicated to the idea that in the very near future we will be able to transfer the details of our minds — our memories, our beliefs, our thoughts and feelings, making up what Terasem calls a "mindfile" — into another "biological or nanotechnological body," like a computer, or a robot.

Bina-48 is a very visceral representation of a much larger question that experts in artificial intelligence and robotic design are asking worldwide: how "human" do we really want to make our new robots? Is there a greater purpose in making them look like us, or are we just creating ethical and moral questions that wouldn't arise if these machines were merely computers, sitting on desks — no eyes, no hands, no face?

<snip>

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/17/you-robot-personal-robots_n_1660362.html?utm_hp_ref=technology

[CJCRANE]

1. Can I have my flying car now too?

We've got the corporate dystopia and screwed up climate that sci-fi predicted, now it's time for some of the perks.

[pinboy3niner]

6. Perks? ...

[longship]

2. Sorry! I am still waiting for the orgasmitron.

(From Woody Allen's Sleeper.)

[cali]

3. that reminds me of something

One of my dad's closest friends was a conductor and composer. He was a wee bit nuts. He was a big believer in Wilhelm Reich's Orgone boxes. When his son was about 9, the son had stomach pains so my dad's friend put the kid in an orgone box to "fix' him. The kid nearly died of a burst appendix.

From Wiki:

Further information: Orgone
Human-sized orgone energy accumulator (door closed)

Freud had argued that there was a sexual energy called libido, which he initially described as "something which is capable of increase, decrease, displacement and discharge, and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body." By 1925 he had rejected the idea that it was a physical energy.[9] Reich took the idea further, arguing that he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy. In 1939 he first referred to it "orgone," and the study of it "orgonomy." He wrote that orgone is blue in color, omnipresent, can be seen with the naked eye, and is responsible for such things as the weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. He argued that St. Elmo's Fire is a manifestation of it, as is the blue color of sexually excited frogs. Red corpuscles, plant chlorophyll, gonadal cells, protozoa, and cancer cells are all charged with orgone, he said.[32] He argued that humankind had split its knowledge of orgone in two: "ether" for its mechanistic, physical aspects, and "God" for the spiritual and subjective.[47]

<snip>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orgone_Box

In 1940, he built boxes that he called "orgone accumulators" to concentrate atmospheric orgone. Some of the boxes were for lab animals, and some were large enough for a human being to sit inside. Composed of alternating layers of ferrous metals and organic insulators with a high dielectric constant, the accumulators had the appearance of a large, hollow capacitor. Based on experiments with them, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. The construction of the boxes caught the attention of the press, leading to wild rumours that they were "sex boxes" that caused uncontrollable erections.

According to Reich's theory, illness was primarily caused by depletion or blockages of the orgone energy within the body. He conducted clinical tests of the orgone accumulator on people suffering from a variety of illnesses. The patient would sit inside the accumulator and absorb the "concentrated orgone energy." He built portable accumulator-blankets of the same layered construction for application to parts of the body. He wrote that effect was to boost the immune system, even to the point of destroying certain types of tumors. The orgone accumulator was also tested on mice with cancer, and on plant-growth.[48] He had, he believed, developed a grand unified theory of physical and mental health, a claim regarded by the psychoanalytic community as "quackery."[49] The scientific community has also widely dismissed his work on orgone as pseudoscience.[50]

[hifiguy]

4. So everyone will have a drinking buddy!

[TlalocW]

5. Dwight Schrute had the right idea

Robots need to be about half the size of humans, and they have to be powered by an extension cord so that if they do go crazy, if we get out of their maximum reach, we're safe.

TlalocW

[TreasonousBastard]

7. "Twilight Zone" dealt with the ethics and ramifictions years ago, and...

"Eureka" just this month.

The ethics of it all are easy-- just how we're going to handle it in real life when it happens isn't.

[Tyrs WolfDaemon]

8. Soon we will have to worry about drunken neighbors giving our washing machines herpes

Personally I want my cyber-brain with a prosthetic-body and a fully armed Tachikoma in the garage

[Octafish]

9. Thought you were talking about Romney.

Sorry!