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Dancing Robots Help Preserve Japanese Culture
Neil Halelamien writes "As reported on robots.net and other sources, researchers at Tokyo have used the HRP-2 Promet humanoid robot to help preserve moves from ancient Japanese dance for future generations. The researchers used motion capture to record the movements of a dancing master, then encoded and replayed them on the robot. The HRP-2 Promet robots are themselves quite interesting, capable of standing up after lying down and non-autonomously operating a backhoe. The external appearance was created by a designer known for his work on several anime series."
I for one CANNOT welcome some japanese dancing fairy robots as my overlords. Maybe if they were veritech and at least transformed, but these robot overlords are way to geisha for me.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
Do the do DDR?
...kill all the humans. Step, step, turn, shuffle, kill all the humans...
Tell that to the Okinawans; as young people, especially girls, leave the prefecture, they are having a harder and harder time finding people to learn traditional Okinawan dances. Is it better for the dance to be completely lost than for a robot to do it? Surely someone can learn it from the robot, but if its gone, its gone.
I'm sure a lot of people said the same thing when television could bring theatre into the home. A play on TV isn't real theatre, it loses its meaning.
Furthermore, it seems to me that you seem to think that the Japanese are all going to teach their robots to dance and they won't have to bother. That seems pretty unlikely. This is obviously another step in getting functioning robots, not a government program to make dancing machines. In short, I call typical American xenophobia.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)