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Martial Arts Robots
curmudgeous writes "Japanese tech firms are making waves with robots trained to perform martial arts moves." On one hand, this is largely just a novelty, but on the other, robots capable of doing these moves are many steps closer to being able to move around in real world environments. But mostly, sumo stomping robots look cool.
Not so fast... Remember that these robots are still operating in highly controlled environments, performing a small number of carefully scripted and highly constrained maneuvers. Granted, these are no small feat, but they are still a long way from navigating complex and unpredictable environments -- something humans and other "biologicals" do all the time without even thinking.
Again, these robots have made huge strides (pun intended), but they have a long way to go before they can go out and take a stroll through a field or walk down a busy city sidewalk in traffic.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
If these Japanese tech firms were serious about showing off what their robots can do, then they would build a robot that find and disarm abandoned land mines in third-world farming areas.
... And then didn't bother to make maps of their locations for future removal because there was no one important in the area anyway...
Thousands of people are maimed each year from these millions of little bombs scattered throughout the countryside.
By producing millions of these robots to disarm land mines and then sending them freely to be used in the third world, the Japanese would take the moral high ground from everybody for the next century.
Haveing your keiretsu's name and logo on the machine that just saved the lives of a farmer's wife and children wouldn't hurt either. The farmer and his children would be much more inclined to buy Japanese products as the years go by and they get more money from their now-productive fields.
Especially if it were Americans and Russians who put the land mines in the field in the first place.