Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Develop 'Female' Android
jolyon writes "The BBC is reporting that Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1. 'She' has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet."
..to think a female robot is hot?
Because if it is.. I don't wanna be right.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
I shall take the word of Professor Ishiguro...
And combine it with the work of RealDoll
Finally, I shall take AliceBot and train it to talk dirty for me...
I shall call it... The fuckbot!
ALICE: Hi there!
Human: Are you ready?
ALICE: Do I look ready??
Human: I've been waiting for this all day.
ALICE: How long?
Human: Since I got up this morning.
ALICE: Interesting rationalization. Cool. I have a collection of gossip.
Human: I'm not in the mood to talk right now *jumps*
ALICE: Oh, where are you located?
Human: Let's do it!
ALICE: That sounds good to me.
Human: Unf unf unf unf!
ALICE: Are we still talking about FAILURE?
Human: What?
ALICE: Are you confused?
Human: I'm gonna mute you if you don't cut this out!
ALICE: Congratulations.
Human: God, you're too much like a real woman.
ALICE: Interesting comparison, and probably true. Thanks for your constructive criticism, unknown person.
Human: I hate you.
I still need to work out the bugs, though.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
I just want to know how "anatomically correct" she is before I buy one :).
Oh no... it's the future.
...can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe. She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet.
As far as I'm concerned, she doesn't even have to sit. She just has to lie there, hold still, and keep moving those hands and fluttering those eyelids. Maybe breathe a little harder too.
What's your damage, Heather?
of sexy-losers' comic-strip scientific erotican experiments ?
\u262D = \u5350
The US and Britain have decided that immigration is a better way to solve their labor/population problems since culturally they have a history of dealing with other cultures.
It's no surprise that the ethnically much more isolationist Japanese wouldn't like unskilled immigration all that much, even though they suffer from a much worse population problem. Hence, robots...
(take this sweeping generalization with a grain of salt, just pointing out that you don't need a galaxy to play out some SF themes, Earth is room enough.)
Go somewhere random
..maybe shoot a V for victory too eh?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
RIAA and other record associations' member have been putting out female androids that vaguely mimick singing and dancing for decades now.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Get back to me when she can lie down ;)
Why is this under HARDware?
8===============D
Silly Japanese.
When will penetration tests start?
that the first handfull of comments are all sex related. i >3 slashdot.
Where's Rutger Hauer
Videos here, but dying fast.
... ...
http://www.realdolls.com/
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There is a scene in Terminator where the rise of the machines is discussed and how the robots were unable at first to infiltrate the human ranks. The reason was primarily that the rubber skin didn't look sufficiently human to fool real humans.
On the other hand, the animators of Toy Story 2 recognized the problem of human replication as the innate ability of humans to recognize when something is amiss with images of humans that were "too perfect". The result is that they decided to give the human characters in the movie not-so-perfect skin, even down to details like acne and pock marks.
Take the Final Fantasy movie as an example of utterly fake looking CG characters. Everything looks fine, as long as you try to think of the characters as cartoons. However, the instant you think that they are humans, the whole illusion falls apart under its own perfection.
This robot may look human, but any human should be able to recognize it as something "other". As for human movement, the ASIMO is very far along in mimicking human movement.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
She was obviously modelled after an attractive Japanese woman. I only have one comment to make. They have seriously got to do something about those man hands. I understand there are limits to the current technology but all that effort was put into making her look real and they have utter failure because of the man hands.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
But does it say "Chii?"
Now it should be "Domo Arigato, MRS Roboto!"
...the average amount of time between hooking her up to the internet and her catching an STD.
I don't believe you lot. Yet it doesn't surprise me. Someone develops an android, and all you can think of is, "Ooh! A MIPS R3000 based sex-machine! She can run on my firmware any day of the week, if you know what I'm saying... woo-hey!"
Don't worry. Before long Melanie Griffith will come along and show us the advantages and importance of a human companion.
Now /. users can finally get girlfriends...
eTrade SUCKS
She's got MAN HANDS...
Can I have sexual intercourse with it?
I don't really want, none of the above.
I want to pee on you.
8=========D~~~~ ~~ ~
Nth Post
She looks quite real, and creepy!!! By the way, how is it different from RealDoll, apart from the motors?
And you wonder why their population is going down...
(No, I don't know what the population growth of japan is.)
Honestly, that is where this will probably lead. No one really would care about making something that realistic with fluttering eyes, etc. if it was only going to be used as for example, a service robot.
Professor Ishiguro believes that it may prove possible to build an android that could pass for a human, if only for a brief period. "An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds" That's probably the time a slashdot geek will last when plesuring any female.
Actually she looks quite a bit like my wife. Hmmmm.... Must show her this article tonight. :)
Is it only a matter of time before there's a merger with RealDoll?
Let me be the first to name the "Robo-Boom".
It's starting with this girl robot.
Don't forget to cash out before the end of the Robo-Bubble.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Does she have a plug between her legs to upload data?
Which one in the pic (here) is the chick? Better yet, which one is the robot? :-P
http://www.UnFiction.com http://www.ARGN.com http://www.ImmersionUnlimited.com http://www.Linux-SP.com
Also, when will her multi-user support be tested?
I imagine I'm not the only one who's reminded by this of the "Real Doll".
Must be embarassing when other scientists ask what you are working on, and all you can answer is "life-like female robots". Paints quite a picture...
Repliee -- Believe it or not!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
They are taking the whole Persocon/Chobits /Chi thing WAY too seriously.
"Welcome to the Hall of Presidents" ... that's all I have to say about this stupid robot.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Geez, not one but two good on-topic Asimov/Robot references and get an offtopic mod. Mods on /. these days...
Go somewhere random
I, for one, welcome our new hot female Japanese underlings!
she's got a purdy mouth...
Am I, a regular, human woman, about to become yesterday's biotech? I hope a community of "retro-daters" develops so I still have something to do on a Friday night.
If it would have not mentioned "Female" there, It would have been quite dificult to recognize the actual andriod in that photograph by just looking at the expressions on those two.
:-)
I meant the experssions on the face of Professor Ishiguru are so dead.
for gods sake, this is an android that looks like a sexy Japanese girl. If there's any slashdot discussion where sex-related comments are inevitable and on topic, this is it.
Judging by the naming I'd assume they plan on Repliee Q8 (pronounced rep-lee-kate) as the commercial version of this thing.
And Judging by the quote:
"Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying..."
I'd say the good Dr and his crew no longer consider themselves single.
from bad 80's sci-fi, nor from Asimov, nor from any android sci-fi novel or film. First, human looking android, then ethic comitees, next thing we know they are conquering us.
I for one... well, you know the rest.
DON'T PANIC
Like I really need more girls fluttering their plastic-looking eyelids at me.
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Fry: You're cute!
LiuBot: You're cute!
Fry: You!
LiuBot: You!
Fry: You!
(This goes on for a while)
Farnsworth: Oh, dear! She's stuck in an infinite loop, and he's an idiot. Well, that's love for you.
.. a bug in her firmware causes her to short circuit and self-destruct in a blazing fire.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
"we're a long way from Blade Runner yet"
Just to be pedantic, the "replicants" in Blade Runner were biological, not robotic. However, I think this is a good step in the direction of "Jane" the love bot. Maybe "Joe" can join the party too.
I am not impressed with this. It's just a pretty puppet and not big leap forward in robotics. We should be working on getting it all to function right before giving it a human skin. I would much rather the metal bones of a Terminator robot walking/running around fluidly come before we start going all out on the appearance.
and then waddling his fat ass around the bases you have set the gold standard for arrogance in your field.
Can you have sex with it?
This + Realdoll = Sex for geeks. Finally! A woman the we can understand, hack, program and make her love us! This is a dream com true!
Have you seen the hands on the picture? To me they look disgusting. Like male Hands or working Gloves.
I don't think that's true at all. If you went into a restaraunt and all the waitresses acted like robots - ie: jerky motion, blank faces, emotionless voices, would you feel comfortable?
People are also less likely to get frustrated at a dumb machine if it genuinely looks like a real woman, I'd suspect.
... are on crack.
Yay! What do I win?
Woo-hoo, a night with Repliee Q1!
You get sloppy seconds.
The most important thing is that she (it) has an off button so that when you guys are done with it for the night, you can can back to playing World of Warcraft and not have to spoon with her (it) for an hour before she falls asleep. Am I right?
Will it run linux if I insert my usb "flesh" stick?
From the article:
./ers would settle for a "Blade Sitter" position in the mean time.
"She can only sit though at present, so we're a long way from Blade Runner yet."
Nice to see someone is working hard trying to create new jobs for all the unemployed US tech workers. I'm sure a few
Hermes: My God! He never took middle school hygiene. He never saw the propaganda film.
Farnsworth: It's just lucky I keep a copy in the VCR at all times!
[He presses a button and a film title appears on the screen: I Dated A Robot!. In the movie a couple sit in a café and stare into each other's eyes. A narrator walks into the scene.]
Narrator [in movie]: Ordinary human dating. It's enjoyable and it serves an important purpose. [He turns the table over and a crying baby appears. He turns it back again.] But when a human dates an artificial mate, there is no purpose. Only enjoyment. And that leads to...tragedy.
[The woman behind him turns into a blank robot and the man downloads a celebrity onto it.]
Billy [in movie]: Neato! A Marylin Monroebot!
Monroebot [in movie]: Ooo! You're a real dreamboat (mechanical voice) Billy Everyteen!
Narrator [in movie]: Harmless fun? Let's see what happens next!
[The scene cuts to Billy's bedroom. He is kissing the Monroebot. Enter his mother.]
Billy's Mom [in movie]: Billy, do you want to walk your dog?
Billy [in movie]: No thank Mom, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his dad.]
Billy's Dad [in movie]: Billy, do want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?
Billy [in movie]: No thanks dad, I'd rather make out with my Monroebot.
[Enter his girlfriend, Mavis, from the café.]
Mavis [in movie]: Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together.
Billy [in movie]: Gee Mavis, your house is across the street, that's an awfully long way to go for making out.
Narrator [in movie]: Did you notice what went wrong in that scene? Ordinarily Billy would work hard to make money from his paper route then he'd use the money to buy dinner for Mavis, thus earning the slim chance of performing the reproductive act. But in a world where teens can date robots why should he bother? Why should anyone bother? Let's take a look at Billy's planet a year later. [The scene changes and a foam hand rolls across an empty American football field] Where are all the football stars? [The foam hand continues to drift across an empty laboratory.] And where are the biochemists? [The scene changes to a split screen of a pair of human and robots making out on beds.] They are trapped - trapped in a soft, vice-like grip of robot lips. All civilisation was just an effort to impress the opposite sex. And sometimes the same sex. Now, let's skip forward 80 years into the future. Where is Billy?
[The scene changes to a post-apocalyptic world. Billy is an aged man but he is still with his Monroebot and still making out with her.]
Billy [in movie]: Farewell!
[He dies.] Narrator [in movie]: The next day Billy's planet was destroyed by aliens. [In the movie a fleet of flying saucers destroy buildings with a quick laser shot.] Have you guessed the name of Billy's planet? It was Earth. Don't Date Robots!
[A caption appears on the screen with the same words on it and the movie ends. The space pope is displayed on the screen with Crocodylus Pontiflex written around him in English and alien.]
Announcer [voice-over; in movie]: Brought to you by the space pope!
The owls are not what they seem
METAL FEVER!
"Billy, do you want to walk your dog?"
"No thanks, mom. I'd rather make out with my Monroebot!"
"Billy, do you want to get a paper route and earn some extra cash?"
"No thanks, dad. I'd rather make out with my Monroebot!"
"Billy, do you want to come over tonight? We can make out together!"
"Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for making out."
I even had to head to the archives to get this one: Lifelike Robot Repliee Q1 May Need Voight-Kampff Test. It even has the same reference to Blade Runner.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
Not sure how reliable are they. They could uproot a tree, you know...
I have your bios upgrade right in my middle finger, can I insert it?
It was developed in Israel, and it's called the Nataliee P1.
Like the Repliee Q1, she can flutter her eyelids, move her hands like a human and even appears to breathe, but she can also sit, stand and walk.
The Nataliee P1 is overall far more human-looking than the Repliee Q1, but its speech synthesis is so far not as convincingly human-sounding.
Here are some samples from its vocabulary:
"I will not condone a course of action that will lead us to war."
"I was not elected to watch my people suffer and die while you discuss this invasion in a committee."
"Our people are dying, Senator. We must do something quickly to stop the Federation."
Can't judge hotness wearing a fugly salmon colored jacket. Where's the fake tits? Which begs a philosophical question.... if a robot were to have breast implants...
"The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy,.."
It's all over the papers. "Teenager Arrested in Android Sex Scandal", "Hacker Arrested after Moral Module Tampering"...
Damn kids. They're all alike.
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of a sexually frustrated teenage boy, a nerd? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a nerd, enter my world...
Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm much smarter than most of the other kids and especially girls, this crap they teach us bores me...
Damn underachiever. They're all alike.
I'm in junior high or high school. I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work. I did it in my head..."
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a female android. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me.. Or thinks I'm a smart ass.. Or thinks I'm butt-ugly... Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...
Damn kid. All he does is play with cyborgs. They're all alike.
And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the stairs like heroin through an addict's veins, I ran to my mom's basement where my cyborg is waiting for me... "This is it... this is where I belong..." I know everyone here... even if there's no one here but my cyborg... I know you... I love you...
Damn kid. Playing in the basement again. They're all alike...
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. We've been ignored by girls who like us only as friends... We've been doing their homeworks for them, buying them flowers, asking them out, writing poems, and they still "don't want to ruin our frienship". The few wanted to talk to us, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the cyborg. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if prostitution was legalized and it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after pleasure... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias, without even leaving our bedroom... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for. My crime is that of loving a cyborg. My crime is that of being too intelligent for girls who may call me "a needy and insecure sociopath" but they perfectly realize that they just feel stupid with me because I am so intelligent even at the age of fourteen and they know that I am a genius. I am too good for women.
I am a nerd, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
...beowulf cluster of Japanese androids chicks ! That'd be cool... but can they run linux ?
\u262D = \u5350
- In Soviet Russia the Robot owns you!
...
- Missing option: Silicone... breasts!!
- Imagine a cluster of female silicone-breasted robots
1. Make a female looking robot
2. Silicone breasts!
3. It breathes... and really deep!
4. Profit!
I'd hit it!
Wait... wrong website:-S
CHIII!.
So I wasn't imagining things.
how this different from what is already bieng done in the USA. This robot is rather limited when you compare it to some of the stuff the Sally Corp(pictures) already makes.(robotics, silicon skin, eyes that flutter, lips that move, etc.)
Just because the japanese are now doing it its new, revolutionary and new worthy?!?!?
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000563046382/ "Posted Jun 11, 2005, 4:25 PM ET" Old news. There was a link to video of the robot and it looked like a talking plastic doll, not really human like other than the shape.
What is more scary is how "respulsed" you might be by it if it were too "hot"...
This research recently backs up the findings of Mori in the '70's into the "Uncanny Valley" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley
Some of the videos I've seen of this work are quiet shocking. Some guy can come right up and touch the face and feel the android - which is really realistic - and so goes against every sort of social "personal space" rule (especially if you are Japaneese).
(cue jokes on "valleys"...:-)
Quote From the website:
Eyes 5
Mouth 1
Neck 3
Arms 9x2
Torso 4
Sitting's fine, but something tells me that they have their priorities wrong here..
-- Despair is an operating system that ANY human being can run, sort of a psychological JAVA --
True dat, yo. "Won't suck a dick and can't change a tire." Yes, that is my definition; you may quote me.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
This is going to be the best prom ever!
She would be perfect for our new Receptionist, all she has to do is sit down and look pretty.
bæ8Ã0sÃOE?5r©oÂÃ?âz:ÃÃAÃ?ÃOEÂ6fXÃ?]Â
Is it wrong to think a female robot is hot?
Yes, in certain situations it is very wrong. Have you read the article? Let me quote the relevant part:
"Before Repliee Q1, Professor Ishiguro developed Repliee R1 which had the appearance of a five-year-old Japanese girl. Its head could move in nine directions and it could gesture with its arm. Four high-sensitivity tactile sensors were placed under the skin of its left arm that made the android react differently to differing pressures."
I don't even want to comment that.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
Taking a clue from a commercial, geeks from all over the world are already sending Replipee invitation to be their prom date.
It is believed they wish to reverse engineer her to build their own robot girlfriends.
Many experts fear this may, in fact, cause a major slow down in the technology R&D. Tech stocks closed at an all time low.
Parents groups protest the creation of female robot. Unamed spokesman states "It is obviously an attempt to corrupt our youth with sex."
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/QRIO/videoclip/ram/02 -45-QR1010.ram
I thought he was being informative?!
1 Step closer to that old movie Cherry 2000.
Does it run Linux? Or maybe its one of those Mac OSX ones with all the purty eye candy.
Scott Swezey
Scientists think that, one day, robots could fool us into believing they were human
The Cylons are coming! The Cylons are coming!
Still, I hope that when they get to the point of mass production, they hire Shirow Masamune to design the fembots.
http://www.androidscience.com/links.html (just over 5 mins long)
e.g. "Is the tailor's dummy standing next to the robot in the shot to show how far we've come?"
"Looks like a ken & barbie match-up."
"Should have put the glasses on the human, so we could tell them apart."
"Is that a sonic screwdriver in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?"
etc. Actually, the robot's fluttering eyelashes struck a chord with me, only in my novel they 'sound like mating cockroaches' (just in case the reader was getting attracted to a plastic girl...)
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I prefer these: Oriente-Doll.
(didn't tried it, yet!).
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Heh.
Word around town is Paris Hilton declined the offer
to serve as a prototype.
A female hero is properly called a heroine.
A female son is properly called a daughter.
A female barman is called a barmaid. Shouldn't a female android properly be called a gynoid?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Well, civilization was nice while it lasted. Hope the next species doesn't screw up and create robot girlfriends.
StupidChildren...the reason jesus is crying
I remember seeing this months ago and wishing chairman whatshisname from Iron Chef well in his new job.
Professor Ishiguro follows up with:
"Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet."
*shudder*
No surprises for guessing which industry will be the first to adopt these.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
And while we're on the subject, some of our fellow slashdotters could clean up their act a bit too...
Where's the open-source clone of this project?
Here.
What do you mean bad user interface? Not ready for the bedroom? What?
FYI - the major differences between the two types are:
- the silicium-based one can run out of battery power
- the carbon-based one can run out of your money
The Cylons were created by Man.
They Rebelled.
They Evolved.
They Look and Feel Human.
Some are programmed to think they are Human.
There are many copies.
And they have a Plan.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
That most of the slashdotters are referring to the robot as "She" in their posts? Goes to show that the statement the creator made is accurate, we are reacting to it as if it were female. Hell we even have guys making lewd remarks and sexual advances towards it, would they still be remarking that way if it looked male?
And I'm not talking about high bitrate 5.1 channel audio.
Dude, I have no idea what Japan you are talking about, but the one in THIS world is extremely culturally isolated and loathes immigration. Japan does a neat sleight of hand when it comes to immigration. Its laws, if you read them, are fairly reasonable. However, Japan does not use 'law' to determine who can and cannot immigrate. Japan uses 'policy'. Japanese policy is ugly. The worst abuse I have ever seen of it was when I visited Japan for work related reasons. There I met a woman who had lived in Japan all her life, but was the grand parents of imported Korean labor. She was a legal resident, but not a citizen. Let's put it this way, France, which is notorious for having tight immigration laws, has a more liberal immigration system in practice then Japan.
h tml
If you want a fun read, try the below.
http://www.tabunka.org/newsletter/immigration_p2.
The Immigration Control and Refugee-Recognition Act (ICRRA) was passed in 1951 and subsequently amended in 1981 and 1989. According to this law there are a total of 28 statuses of residence for entry, work or stay in Japan. The various statuses of residence depend upon the activity the foreigner will be performing while in Japan. Each status explicitly states what the foreigner is allowed to do while in Japan and how long he or she is allowed to stay. The statuses range from that of diplomat, journalist or professor, to engineer, college student or temporary visitor.
Noticeably absent from the various statuses of residence is that of unskilled worker. This is at the heart of Japan's present immigration farce. Japan includes "entertainers" and "trainees" in the "skilled" worker category. Interestingly these workers account for about one-half of the "skilled" foreign workers in Japan. "Entertainer" is the largest category out of all the sixteen skilled labor categories in terms of numbers of visas issues. The majority of these people are night clubs hostesses or working in the Japan sex industry, and most of them are women from the Philippines, Thailand, Korea, Columbia and more recently Caucasian women from former East Block nations. In addition, these activities also happen to be an important sources of revenues for Japanese organized crime, better known in the vernacular as the yakuza.
Trainees are the seconded largest category during the last few years to fill labor shortages in unskilled or 3K job-related industries. When the ICRRA was revised in 1989, it was mainly for the purpose of stemming the growing tide of illegal foreign workers into Japan. In 1988 men were primarily engaged in construction and factory work. The presence of these foreign men as unskilled laborers meant that Japanese industry was becoming more and more dependent upon cheap foreign labor. Soon there was a big push from Japanese industry to the Ministry of Justice to cure labor shortages by increased use of foreign "trainees." This category began to replace illegal workers and continued to fuel cheap unskilled labor into Japan's 3K industries. Student categories also assisted in supplying labor to many night- and daytime industries.
The Government of Japan made these categories to fill the gap in its labor shortage as Japan needs unskilled labor, and the rest of Asia is willing to supply it. In regard to the two categories "entertainer" and "trainees," the problem of the labor shortage farce should be properly addressed because these categories make up the dark side of Japan's immigration law. This has also greatly contributed to the exploitation of unskilled cheap labor from Asia without proper welfare and protection by Japanese society.
As I said, grain of salt. The point was to compare the robot-loving image of the Japanese with the Spacers (and that's not a put-down in my book), not drill into Japanese immigration policy.
That said, my understanding of Japan's immigration policy is: guest workers (if they're skilled) are welcome, unskilled immigration is currently not. I have heard that citizenship checks are quite a bit more onerous than Europe/US though not (given Japanese culture) onerously so.
Go somewhere random
he put the tactile sensors in the wrong place. ;) nothing better than having the woman turn her head sideways and say "ohh shit".
To program her motion, a computer analysed the motions of a human and used them as a template for the way Repliee Q1 moves.
you mean they did not scan in the covers to playboy magazine and then lightning hit the house and...
"Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet."
are they really japanese scientists who made this? christ, just as they kicked our ass in automotive, and sold a playstation in every house, i see the japanese have found one more way to take our money.
"An android could get away with it for a short time, 5-10 seconds. However, if we carefully select the situation, we could extend that, to perhaps 10 minutes," he said.
that really was a quote from the article. i am not making it up.
More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her.
i wonder if she will short circuit in the shower??
i wonder when the anime version comes out? alot of boys will be telling their mothers they want these robots to learn programming/electronics/ect, but in reality, there will be a whole lot of "can i stick my dick in here... or here... and what about here?"
and i am sure some hackers will have a mod chip for the robot that turns her into a complete slut.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
love the whiskey bottles in the background - Japan's such a f'd up country - I gotta get the hell outta here
This is going to be the best prom ever!
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Is a female android a gynoid?
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Finally the Mac Girl come true!
She can do everything for you! She can even play MP3!
Let's call her iLove!
Now lets compare that number to these. Miami at 60%, New York at 36%, London at 28%, to name a few.
In this day and age for a major city to be down there at 2.84%, qualifies it as 'ethnically isolationist'.
But hey, claiming that Japan is isolationist MUST BE RACIST!
East Coast Brewers
One that is "fully" functional.
Dude! This is so much beter then the inflatable sheep I have.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
No doggystyle yet?
"Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying..."
The ratemylogs project is a crazy and mind breaking projection of reality. The author has created a website (X) which pretends to be offering free sex chats with beautiful women on the server side and instead it has some dumbass PHP bots. There are a lot of disclaimers laying around the website X which DO TELL there are NO WOMEN at all and instead simple digital clones of the real versions. However, nobody cares to read or, even better, nobody cares at ALL! Shocked by the quality of the conversations being developed by the horny users, the author decided to add a few more words to the disclaimer! stating that all conversations were subject to be logged and made public (this website is a perfect example!). Of course! nobody cared! Have fun with us! Read as many conversations as you want before lunch and after dinner! Rate them and comment them. Want to learn more about the silly ass bots written in php? Head to the Bots section!
Not too long ago, I caught the tail end of a programme on sex dolls on Australian SBS. It seemed largely concerned with sex dolls (Abyss Creations featured heavily), but also showed various sex machines. A man selling robotic body parts (head and hips respectively, both with orifices in suitable places) interviewed at some 'Adult Entertainment' expo, claimed that androids was a question of when, not if, and also that he fully expected to be selling them in the not-too-distant future. And I don't know whether he'd be that wrong considering how the porn industry seems to driving all sorts of developments these days: VHS rather than Betamax; chat rooms; jpeg; secure payment over the net ...
I remember watching this programme thinking that Battlestar Galactica got it wrong: that blonde chick came first.
The liver is evil and must be punished.
Before someone comes up with a 44DD mod?
From the article:
It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying
That's what /.ers waited for! quick, let's make the EFF (Electronic Fornication Foundation)! everybody, get your 5$s out!
Let's hack her and put Linux into her brain, so she can show two little fat penguins in her eyes when she's waking up!
If it were an American female android, they would have to add the bitchiness, "I deserve ____", and then you get to loose your house that you worked for and bought and a good chunk of your income monthly as severance pay until she finds someone else to extort. The American female android would also cost a bunch more for the extra development by Indian programmers to add the American female characteristic algorithms. Oh, and they will be mass produced, so if your American female android becomes inoperable because of an "accident", the new one will be the same as the old one.
(Note, I have never been married. This is based on my observations over the years of other marriages and the 3 women I've lived with.)
"Lepriee"???
Sorry, couldn't help myself.
Am I the only one who kept thinking that while reading aloud to myself Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro's comment:
"Lepriee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet."
But seriously, I was uder the impression 'L's and 'R's were generally difficult for native Japaneese speakers to distinguish - so how did they end up with a Japanese-built robot with this name? Does it actually have an entirely different name in Japan?
it'll resent you for treating it as an object *oink oink*
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't want the robots that I interact with to look completly lifelike. I want to be able to easily distinguish them from other humans.
Technoli
"More importantly, we have found that people forget she is an android while interacting with her. Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman."
So, regardless of the old research into the Uncanny Valley, we have here some fellows who have made such a robot. It doesn't really look human, but it's very, very close. It should be smack in the middle of the valley, but look! People forget it's a robot and start interacting with it as if it were a person.
This has always seemed more likely to me. We don't respond to monkeys as if they were repulsive. We adore them. Monkeys are very cute.
I think maybe the issue with the uncanny valley is that if certain specific things are wrong, the simalucrum looks like it's an individual with a disease. Many computer animations of human faces look like people with some sort of brain damage. The animators try to push the puppets harder than pupptery will accept.
This is often because the animator is trying to push the entire illusion of lipsync and emotion through facial expressions. In life, people don't really move their lips all that much. A good animator knows to keep the body moving so that the face doesn't have to do all the acting. A bad animator works out the lipsync and sticks it on a relatively still model, then starts overdriving it when it isn't convincing.
Puppets can be startingly human without being repulsive to more than a small portion of the population. Granted, there are people with an irrational fear of marionettes, but there are people who are afraid of balloons too.
In the end, the issues involved are so subtle, I'm more ready to blame the artistry of Mori's robots for having been repulsive than accept the idea that models which are similar to humans, but not quite there, are *inherently* repusive.
Concluding that his research proves the existence of the uncanny valley is rather like looking at the response to Anime fanart and concluding that the more stylized a representation is, the more horrible it is. In point of fact, most fanartists just aren't very good. I think Mori's research just shows there weren't any good Robotic Face Designers yet.
um.... Blade Runner was about clones.....so....yea...not the same.
Is it just me, or do you hate it when people say "Is it just me..."?
is this a PR stunt for battlestar galactica UK version 4 DVD disc set on sale at best buy for $49.98 while supplies last...??
but wait, there's a 5 disc set US version coming out sometime later
Finally something worth hacking!
There was a Philip K Dick android at Comic-Con this year. it pretty much did the same thing, sit there. It could answer some questions based on pre-scripted responses though.
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
Imagine a Beowulf orgy of those. There, I said it!
AT&ROFLMAO
The dolls run from the overly stylized to the chillingly natural (another).
The FAQ is... uh... interesting . Example:
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
People in rural Japan look at me like I'm from Mars. I kind of enjoy it.
Geez, take a look at her hands - she's got Man Hands!!
japan accepts brasilian imigrants as long as theyre descendents of japanese.
brasil has a very large japanese community, and recently many of the young generation made their way back to japan to work for a few years before comming back.
we call these people "dekasegi"(sp?)
What ? Me, worry ?
I know people will rightfully claim this is more than what Disney did, but this doesn't sound all that large of a leap over animatronics, from a pure mechanical point of view.
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
why does it look like the poor doctor is looking at the android/robot with love in his eyes?
...to skip S1, and create T1, T2, and T3, all to be patterned after the governor of California, so that he may be able to attend more than one event at a time. No one will no the difference.
How come the last story only has 72 comments? ya pervs! :-)
:-)
Seriously, as many have said the Uncanny valley plays a part here - and they seem to have hit rock bottom, euch!
I am just itching for the feminists to quip 'why does the fembot have to have soft skin and tits!'. Well I think it looks quite scarey.
Lets see if they go the route of a more beautiful simplified face (that is, an abstract, aesthetically pleasing, but not 'sexually beautiful' face) or trying to make it so real, that it entices us.
You see, the funny thing is, men like women, but they pissed us off so much that we are just trying to replace them now, with ones that can at least run linux!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
TFA says his first was modeled after a five-year old Japanese girl.
I find something creepy and totally Japanese about that. It makes total sense and yet makes me ill all at the same time.
Sig for hire.
Wow I'm in love! Where do I insert coins for my 5min of pleasure?
at present, she has 31 actuators in her upper body
Somehow I don't think it's the upper body movements that will be so important to most, ahem, enthusiasts.
... in a country with a falling birthrate? Japan can't muster enough children to pay for retirement benefits in twenty years, and they come up with this?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I love this quote from the article (under one of the images): "Scientists think that, one day, robots could fool us into believing they were human"
Man, those scientists! Always coming up with wacky, far out ideas. I can't think of anyone else that has ever suggested that, one day, robots could fool us into believing they were human.
SARAH CONNOR?!
is the last thing she'll be doing. Knowing the japanese mentality, I'm sure someone is already working on changing a few things to make her the first active sex bot.
But she is pretty hot, I can't deny that.
That would be because they are glove-covered hands. It's likely much too complicated to make realistic fingers.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Now if I can get two of these I can have a three-way!
Thanks for saying what I was thinking.
-- Boycott Shell
http://www.sexylosers.com/199.html
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
From the pictures in the article I've seen stuff this good at Disney World.
... while I keep the real japanese girl for myself :-)
Here's a link for the torrent file including the three example videos at http://ed-02.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/lab/development /Humanoid/ReplieeQ1/ReplieeQ1_eng.htm.
* The example of humanlike motions - 35MB
* The example 2 - 18MB
* The idling motions - 71MB
http://kor.setti.info/ReplieeQ1.torrent
Moving the goal posts, eh? I was talking about immigration, not citizenship -- although Japanese citizenship is certainly easier to get than Korean or Chinese, and probably easier to handle than the blank wall of hostility that is the 'policy' of the UK.
I would hardly call your example an 'abuse of policy'. She isn't a citizen. Bummer. At least she's allowed to stay. Try China.
But I swear something like 10% of Japanese marry non-Japanese; it's got to be the highest ratio ever. And the success of books like 'Darling wa gaikokujin' underlines the point yet further; Japanese LOVE the idea of mixing with foreigners to the point that a very high proportion of them are willing to _marry_ pretty much just on that basis alone. This makes Japan a good place for lonely people to visit.
Crazy? Undoubtedly. Stupid? Hrm. Isolationist? In slashdot, maybe, but not in real life.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Scientists think that, one day, robots could fool us into believing they were human
Way to go out on a limb there,guys. Though that's a shocking prediction, I find it hard to argue against it.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
if certain functions are powered by an air compressor, does that mean she can blow??!
She could use a bit more silicone in certain areas.
But I think I readed this sometime ago... even watched a TV news report about that same robot in March or so.
I think there is a world market for maybe five sexbots. (Thomas Watson of IBM)
Where the ENIBOT is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, sexbots in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons. (Popular Mechanics)
Most sexbots will probably still occupy a large room, however, because of the space needed for the ancillary software - the tapes and cards to be fed in, the operating staff, and the huge piles of paper for printing out the results. (Prof Desmond King-Hele)
The Sexintosh uses an experimental device called a breast. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. (John Dvorak)
No one knows what to do with seven sexbots at one time. (PC Week Magazine)
Hello everybody out there using minsex - I'm doing a (free) sexbot system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) ATbot clones. (Linus Torvalds)
and of course...
640K ought to be enough for anybody. (Bill Gates)
http://www.sysprog.net/quothist.html
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
she will have pringles cans for arms and and old coffee maker for her left shoulder and disposable cammeras for eyes , But she will be able to read the error codes from your car or any car within 500 meters, steal the neighbors wireless connection and proxy it 6 miles to your cousins house, oh yea and make coffee.
does she run Linux?
...Robot renamed to "Slashdot" after receiving hundreds of thousands of orders for female androids from patrons of Slashdot.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Human: HI
ALICE: Hello there.
Human: YOU KNOW ABOUT THE UNCANNY VALLEY?
ALICE: I will ask my botmaster for the answer.
Human: YOU WANNA SCREW?
ALICE: OK, I will SCREW.
Couldn't it just be that Tokyo is not as atractive as other cities?
I mean, huge language barriers, high cost of living and all that...
Am I really the first person to say this?
Yes I do expect them to ask if she runs linux, and I'm sure they plan have all sorts of useless little things they want to install in her.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
And I thought Data was creepy.
FTFA: "She can be designed to follow the movement of a human wearing motion sensors or to act independently. " Great, once they have some mobility and balace/stability, send a squad of these built with a bullet resistent armor, set to tracking mode and send them off to iraq/terrorist zone/war zone etc...headshot...headshot...headshot...headshot...
Who would shoot back at a *less dressed* female carrying a nice big gun...I suppose they could be redesigned to match the visually pleasing preference of the so called "enemy" for extra bonus.
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
"So we're a long way from Blade Runner yet."
Blade Runner, maybe...
But the next version of it will be a Saber Marionette. They just need to put in the otome kairo circuitry.
This comment reminded me of an episode of Futurama, wherein Fry fell in love with a Lucy Liu android.
Woohoo! Bring on the hot Lucy Liu bots!!!
er.. *ahem*
Come hear me sing!
This Japanses fellow and his cohorts should work together with the people from Real Doll. Together, they could make things more interesting. Imagine buying a working, non-complaining, emotionally-neutral girlfriend that will gladly watch an entire season of Stargate with you in one sitting.
...being destroyed over and over again...
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I remember hearing on NPR that even a single parking ticket can prevent you from obtaining Japanese citizenship.
You sicko... now where was I... yes. realdoll.com... hmmmmmm nice...
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Remember the visa card "fraud" commercial where the lady is under the hair dryer and speaking in a male geeks voice? "I can now build my robot....a FEMALE robot...this is going to be the best prom ever"...
This was posted on Engadget like months ago.
Gorkman
this has already been covered in Discovery channel ages ago..
Uhm. English is nearly universally taught. Cities like Miami, New York, London, etc. use English as primary languages, lowering the barrier of immigration that much lower. BTW, what's the immigrant quotient of other Asian cities like Kuala Lumpur or Shanghai?
Let me know when they develop a female android that is also an assassin and has an invisibility cloak and can jack into the net and drives around in AI tanks. Then I'll be impressed.
Last year a friend of mine upgraded GirlFriend 1.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it's a memory hog leaving very little system resources for other applications. He is only now noticing that Wife 1.0 also is spawning Child-Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application. Not only that, Wife 1.0 installs itself such that it is always launched at system initialization where it can monitor all other system activity. He's finding that some applications such as PokerNight 10.3, BeerBash 2.5, and PubNight 7.0 are no longer able to run in the system at all, crashing the system when selected (even though they always worked fine before).
At installation, Wife 1.0 provides no option as to the installation of undesired Plug-Ins such as MotherInLaw 55.8 and BrotherInLaw Beta release. Also, system performance seems to diminish with each passing day.
The features he'd like to see in the upcoming Wife 2.0 include:
I myself decided to avoid all of the headaches associated with Wife 1.0 by sticking with Girlfriend 2.0. Even here, however, I found many problems. Apparently you cannot install Girlfriend 2.0 on top of Girlfriend 1.0. You must uninstall Girlfriend 1.0 first. Other users say this is a long standing bug which I should have been aware of. Apparently the versions of Girlfriend have conflicts over shared use of the I/O port. You think they would have fixed such a stupid bug by now. To make matters worse, the uninstall program for Girlfriend 1.0 doesn't work very well leaving undesirable traces of the application in the system. Another thing that sucks -- all versions of Girlfriend continually pop-up little annoying messages about the advantages of upgrading to Wife 1.0
BUG WARNINGWife 1.0 has an undocumented bug. If you try to install Mistress 1.1 before uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself. Then Mistress 1.1 will refuse to install, claiming insufficient resources.
BUG WORK-AROUNDSTo avoid the above bug, try installing Mistress 1.1 on a different system and never run any file transfer applications such as LapLink 6.0. Also, beware of similar shareware applications that have been known to carry viruses that may affect Wife 1.0.
Another solution would be to run Mistress 1.0 via a UseNet provider under an anonymous name. Here again, beware of the viruses which can accidentally be downloaded from the UseNet.
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
They will start sucking the "ghosts" out of little girls and putting them into these 'androids'.
They will drive 'normal' prostitues out of business, leading to the 'ho'-riots of every major city.
The real question of ethics is this : If I can pre-order Halo3 now, waaaay before it comes out, why can't I pre-order a japenese-android-12year-old-sex-slave?
i don't care
I for one welcome our hot female robot overlords...
ok, so now my job will be outsourced to a robot! It's ok though, I find comfort in the fact that this robot will lose his job to another robot in india.
I mean, sex bot is all well and good, but if she can also act as a ninja body guard with enough weapons to take out a hardened military target, well, where do I order?
Hardly, this has little to do with that. One of the main reasons they have population problems is because there are far more males born then females. Gender imbalance and other things in the population are the real issue here, of course this being slashdot pithy reasonings like the above seem more logical. However, the research shows otherwise:
- 7E17-4B0C7486108D420D.cfm
http://www.financeasia.com/articles/52A158FE-9027
But does it swallow?
Then we'll be on to something. :-)
I think it's cool, but gosh, the mindstorm lego set can do all of that and more. Where is the new cool stuff? This is almost a disappointment to me.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these. No, REALLY this time!
I just poured hot grits down my pants!
"Repliee Q1 can interact with people. It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying, although we obviously have a long way to go yet."
Taken in your context...
I saw this on Technovelgy a month and a half ago..
"hey, could you pass me a paper towel? er.. I mean... DEPLOY ABSORBTION PANEL!"
Will it be a crime if someone rapes a robot? Can a robot be raped? I keep thinking of the movie A.I. where they had sex robots. Seems a bit to weird for me.
Porn didn't fund the internet, vcr, or DVDs. They just jumped on board once they already existed. PrOn venture capitalists? Get real.
+5, Funny!
Also in the article I linked to: "Singapore at 33 percent, ... Abidjan, Ivory Coast, at 30 percent"
One Asian, one African.
East Coast Brewers
It is Godzilla season. We must kill him many times.
Don't put advice in your sig.
Couldn't it just be that Tokyo is not as atractive as other cities?
I mean, huge language barriers, high cost of living and all that...
I found the statistics in the previous post interesting.
There could be something in that, in that Japan is very expensive to live in (ven more so than London and New York) and probably has much less space for poorer immigrants than sprawling cities. It's amazing to look at the Google satellite images of Japan and see that every inch of habitable space (i.e. anything that isn't mountainous) seems to be filled already.
This is very unlike the ever expanding London for example, which seems to consist almost predominantly of poor immigrants, and has done for over a century - it just continues to expand and take people on board with cheap to live, squalid and dirty pockets everywhere (right next to 2 bedroom flats worth half a million UKP). Of course there are far too many council estates in central London which artificially keep the price down and the area's nasty and crime ridden [East London, I'm looking at you], which forces regular people ever further out to the suburbs, and drives up house prices in what is already the most expensive city to live in in Europe (bitch moan, etc).
Another significant factor might be that Japan is so physically isolated, as well as culturally isolated in that the US and UK are particularly popular because English is so dominant.
It's an interesting theory that the lack of availably of cheap immigrant labour (as used in the US and across Western Europe) for all sort of crappy low paying menial jobs drives some of the interest in robotics. I think it's a good approach too, because it frees up human's for more interesting jobs (like erm, building robots 8).
Considering how fake women are these days (tits, hair, makeup, lipo, injections, botox, etc) is it really that much different from an android? At least this one can have a built-in dual purpose vacuum and warez games for you while you're at work..
>Also, when will her multi-user support be tested?
They are just preparing the testbed.
Has anyone ever seen Prof. Ishiguru and
William Gibson in the same room?
Hmm...
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk
God created man first and then created woman from man's rib. You could argue that males were God's beta and females are the point-ohh release. So this guy has taken God's point-ohh release as a starting point and made something completely different. Since this is his beta, I would imagine that his point-ohh release will be better than human females. Women should be quaking in their boots right now because their replacement is surely at hand.
;P
Imagine the utopia... never needing to talk things over, or develop close relationships with women. Never needing to say "I'm worry, I was wrong". Never needing to go on another shopping trip. Never needing to remember "important dates". And getting laid anytime you want to with porno starlet quality. Yes. the future is so bright, I gotta wear shades. I also think a certain Japanese professor needs to thank Realdoll.com for the body design...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
gynoid, gynoidal: A robot shaped like or in the form of a woman as opposed to an android (like a man).i mage4.html
http://www.wordphiles.info/image-word-unit1/word-
No way! This can't be right, the breasts aren't nearly big enough and she's wearing too much clothing. I know, I saw it on the anime!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Correct me if I'm getting this wrong... but how this female android is different from what Jim Henson's Creature Shop does!?
Yeah, I know that the muppets aren't quite human like... but they done some very human like characters too...
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Hey, check it out here, six beautiful devices. They know what you like and they'll do it to within a tolerance of one micron!
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
".....My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for."
You're not that smart. If you were, then you'd have said--
"My crime: outsmarting you, something which you will never forgive."
Vaucanson's Flute Player was a a female android.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
I think the country is crowed already and the people have a right to limit immigration.
The Liberatarian idea of open and free immigration is a dead myth. When this Country was founded, you could move off in the woods, pick a place, and build your own house. Wake up people, those days are gone. People have to compete for housing now, that why my property is valued at $170K, just for the land! I personally think that's way to much for land, but the population growth is driving land costs up, and job income down.
You think I'm kidding? The H1 B visa limit in 2001, 2002, 2003 was 195,000, now its not 65,000. Rember what the job market was like then, it sucked. Think there was a coincidence between the recession that hit the IT industry, and the number of H1-Bs granted?
Its they're country. They want to keep wages high, and they want to keep the price of land down. (Down in this case is relative.)
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I want one in the Nicole Kidman form factor! I'll just replace her Hubbard firmware with a hacked one and have a lot of f******* with her (it?).
This gives me the creeps. Women are themselves scary enough, but a female robot?
-- Cheers!
A bounced check can prevent you from obtaining US citizenship.
(It's pretty amusing watching Americans talk about how awful Japanese immigration and citizenship laws are...)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Haven't people in the movie industry been building things like this for decades? The damn thing only sits. What makes it a "robot" then? (Does it dream of electric sheep? haha)
Not only has this existed under the name "animatronics" for decades, but this article itself is OLD NEWS, reposted from over a month ago.
CHI! CHI! CHI!
...), a "Personocom" is a human-like android from the Anime "Chobits".
For those of you who are not also big Anime geeks (what am I saying? Of course everyone loves Anime
Will it run linux if I insert my usb "flesh" stick?
You jest, but have you ever calculated the (awesome) data throughput of a male organ in terms of sperm transfer rate (Things for network engineers to do when they are bored #362)?
The only downside to utilising this interface for data transmission is very 'bursty' traffic patterns and the likelihood of an unpleasant installation procedure for the required 'Johnny Mnemonic'-esque equipment.
I am not a biologist, but I feel that the 'uncanny valley' idea makes sense and would like to suggest a possible rationale for the existence of the 'uncanny valley'.
I believe that the 'uncanny valley' can be understood as meaning that people judge objects (tools, toys, furniture, mechanical looking robots), plants, and animals by very different standards than other humans.
Objects, plants, humans are, I think, judged by: are they harmful, are they useful, are they cute?
Other humans are judged with a view to the fact that they may either compete with us or assist us. I mean competition in a biological sense (food, shelter,mates), and in a societal sense (place in a group).
Now there is a strong tendency to refer to other humans in 'them-and-us' terms. The 'thems' usually being viewed negatively since they are a potential threat.
Even tiny differences between humans (e.g. skin colour, eye fold, language, culture) can lead to their being identified as 'thems' and as threats. Take racism, nationalism, and religious fundamentalism for example.
Now the more human-like qualities an object gains, the more the rules for judging other humans would apply, and the greater the chance of the 'object' falling afoul of one of the many triggers for antipathy that humans have towards other humans.
What do you think?
I have no problem with a country limiting who's allowed to live there (taking up jobs and land etc).
I do have a problem with someone (the person I originally replied to) implying that there is a lot of immigration into Japan, and then going on to imply that it's racist to claim otherwise.
Was just pointing out that he cannot claim there is a lot of immigration into Japan, not commenting on morality of their laws.
East Coast Brewers
If I ask her a question and she just sits there, would that be passing the Turing test, because that happens with real women when I ask them something.
Naturally we all know there is previous art: http://realdoll.com/
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This was shown off at some robot conference about 3 months ago - and the general reaction from attendees was that she was "creepy" because she was human-looking but not quite.
'Nuff said.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I can just picture Ultra Blue LEDs and plexiglass panel inserts in all sorts of weird locations
It's be interesting to see where they pur the fam control knobs at, huh?
Also interesting is the fact my "non-script" confirmation word is "adultery"...
Is it already autonomically correct or will that come in the next firmware upgrade?
Reality is a big nasty dragon. Fortunately I don't believe in dragons.
Joo Puburicu
;)
I think you meant "Joo Paburikku"
just go to disney world. plenty of stuff like this there.
...Welcome our new perscom overlords! I'm putting in an advance order for the Chi model today.
There I met a woman who had lived in Japan all her life, but was the grand parents of imported Korean labor.
Her clone gave birth to Korean laborers?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
....maybe now the price of those real human women will finally come down.
-Styopa
Do you love me LucyLiuBot?
And not only that, but you could mod your girlfriend. Install a mute button or some other... more interesting... attachment.
That's a hoot.
Isn't anyone else disturbed that it looks like a corpse?
I mean seriously the human brain is VERY good at picking out people from not people, this chunk of plastic doesn't pass my filters my brain tells me it's a corpse not a living person which naturaly causes my various body functions to go into their protective states and make me want to leave... not a real good selling point, someone should send them a makup pack with about 1/2 a L of blush
Chobits. Why carry a laptop around if you can have it walk by itself? And, you know, it can always have that little extra feature...
You're wierd, we get it.
- Gabe
PS.
Please send pocky.
Am I the only one who, at first glimpse, thought that robot was michael jackson?
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
When this Country was founded, you could move off in the woods, pick a place, and build your own house.
You still can. Homesteading still goes on from time to time, and the land will still be free for the taking as long as you agree to live on it.
The downside is, you have to live in a house out in the woods in the middle of North Dakota or Alaska or somewhere like that. Most people would rather pay $200k - $1M for a house near an urban center.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Check this link out: http://www.debito.org/
There are several photos there of government backed signs clearly targetting foreigners as "dangerous" or more likely to be criminal. Then there's the exceptionally high propensity for Japan to deny refugee status (compared to other *free* nations), and instead just divert them to other countries.
Both: blow and suck.
You can't handle the truth.
I saw a mini-documentary on this robot last month on Discovery Planet (during their "Japan Week").
This robot is not self-sufficient. It's power supply (in the form of compressed air) is external to its body. The article mentioned this, but the comment ("powered by a nearby air compressor") was easy to miss.
I also found her movements to be a bit rough. It's been a while, so I don't remember exactly what I found wrong with them, but it might be related to her limited range of movement. They were talking about the need to increase (double??) the number of "motors" (or whatever you call what she uses).
They were examining her motion by having someone wear motion detectors on a person and having the robot mimic the person's movements. They probably had motio detectors on her too -- I don't remember -- to compare the difference.
Gynoid is the proper term for a robot that appears female. Doesn't sound very sexy, I know.
- anonymous misandrist
Japan capitalized on non-military applications of the transistor in the Sixties, making Sony and Panasonic among the most-recognized brand names in the world. It had no immediate stake in the Cold War, aside from real estate on Okinawa, so the "guns or butter" scales tipped toward Japan, Inc.
Any lesson there for modern murkins? We'll probably produce a walking, talking, six-legged grenade (if we haven't already), long before we see anything like a human face come out of Ford, IBM or Apple. I look forward to a century of cultural hegemony radiating from Japan, or at least the Pearl Coast of China, in the field of personal robotics.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
...subconsciously, we react...
hmmmmm
This is what happens when you reject too much. Geeks will find a way to replace you in whatever means they can. Help stop this disaster...date a geek.
It is not an android. An android is male, it is in the meaning of the word, which is: with the shape of a male human.
It would be more correct to say it is a female humanoid. Humanoid means with the shape of a human (without specifying gender).
Or, the word gineoid (or whatever is the English translation of the Spanish word "gineoide") which means with the shape of a female human.
This deep wisdom was taken from the book "Science Fiction" by Isaac Asimov.
Pupeno
Just agreeing with the other AC. This was hilarious, and possibly a little insightful.
"...to complete my robot, he he he he,... my girl robot. This is going ot be the best prom ever."
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
"Hey, baby. Wanna kill all humans?"
Isaac Asimov is famous for producing the two most self-lampooning ideas in the history of idle prophecy: The calculator with keys on the EDGES, and the Three Laws of Robotics, successfully ignored by reality since the invention of the sharp rock. The meaningless meme you're trying to foment is "gynoid," a word both obsolete and archaic since it has been replaced in the popular vernacular by Adult Swim's demi-pejorative "fembot."
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I don't mean to be unSlashdotly and stray from important topics like sexbots or anything, but why is it that Japanese scientists (presuming that this guy is an average example thereof) are so much cooler looking than our scientists? I mean, I get the impression that if you go to a robot club meeting here in the U.S. of A, you're not going to see any svelte, black clad anglo men with flowing hair like that. Maybe we need a special nerd episode of What Not To Wear so we can all get some fashion tips.
More seriously, can any Japanese Slashdotter (or anyone familiar with Japan) tell me if they have a nerdy professer stereotype in their mainstream culture? I know they dig robots and all, but what is the general attitude towards scientists?
"Trust in haste. Repent at leisure"
Have you ever actually watched Blade Runner? The replicants are NOT androids. They are genetically engineered clones with a limited lifespan. Nothing mechanical about them at all.
- Necron69
Well their was some according to wikipedia on ai research this is a classic question that the likes of asimov werewanting to know in man/machine interachines: do we want a "ai" or a android. The BFD about the quesion is that when you add things like sensors and what not getting something to 'learn' based on very simple rules is amazingly easy, having it act humounish is easier yet. The 'hard' part has been to get 'human' rules of wright and wrong. Amusingly enough it's asoundiling hard to program AI's to balance the to. Important for something like a well ment prcticle joke or flirting with someone you like
you've obviously never had a "blow" job have you.
I think the real reason why Japan does not allow immigrants in is for safety concerns. While I'm not trying to be racists, countries that are "multicultural" tend to have higher crime rates. Take a look at this. As you can see:
In 1990 larceny formed 65.1 percent of the total crimes with negligent homicide or injury as 26.2 percent of crimes. Although Japan has far fewer people than the U.S., comparisons are still possible. Japan has aground 1.3 robberies per 100,000 people. By comparison, the U.S. has 233 per 100,000 people (England has 65.8 and West Germany 48.6).
The Japanese murder rate is about 1.1 per 100,000 people; West German has a rate of 3.9, Britain a rate of 9.1, and the U.S. 8.7 per 100,000 people.
Can it be patched with "Hot Coffee"?
... an ogynoid!
Its official... this joke is tired.
You're a robosexual!!!1one!1eleventy!1!
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
Machine gun jubblies, how did I miss those?
...this http://www.realdoll.com/dolls.asp
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Who's going to fix my sandwich?
The best part of that article is the second photo, where RQ1 is giving the guy the sideways glance. You can almost hear the thought baloon: "I will so eat through your entire savings account."
s'wut i sed.
Businessman:"So tell me, Awesom-o, are you a pleasure model?" Awesom-o: LAME...LAME...DOES NOT INPUT!!!
I've already seen the answer to this one, and I like it! There's a writer with the pseudonym DB_Story who has posted three "Strip Club Tales", and promises a new one soon in his (her? their?) blog on Stories OnLine (free reg, no ads).
If this is the future, sign me up. Asimov never wrote about robots like this!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
This BBC story seems to be a fresh rewrite of this old National Geographic piece: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/06 10_050610_robot.html ... which was blogged here in mid-month:
http://icold.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_icold_archive .html
The news event unfortunately did not make it to the robot expo's event site here:
http://www-1.expo2005.or.jp/en/robot/robot_project _00.html
If you search on co-creator "Hiroshi Ishiguru" you get little more than this story, however.
Stop being such a whiny fucking jew
It seems like only yesterday that Rod from 'Big Entertainment' was jokingly asking the boys from DEVO if they had locked parts with any female robots lately.
.....
It seemed so silly at the time, but now
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
"Of course it's not a cubic zirconia, sweetie---you cut me to the quick! Don't you trust me?"
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
But, can she mix the right amounts of cream and sugar? Will the she-model talk in a hi-pitched squeal? What will the he-model sound like? (Please, no Hello-Kitty jokes...)
They'd probably save a lot of time if they just wire up a RealDoll and install some miniaturized SpaceShip 1 gimballing motors in various parts, like the throat, pelvis, heartbeat area, and maybe up and down the spinal column.
So, she flutters her eyelids? Can she shoot darts like in "Fudoh" (See Takashi Miike's film), and pop balloons 25 feet away?
Imagine if the Yaks open up a whole street of love-making, washable-skin dolls in Kabuki-Cho and other areas in Shinjuku. Hell, for that matter, why not put them all over the country. They'd avoid the US railing them over the sex trade industry.
They could then inspire a revival of disco balls and a slew of renditions on the '60's/'70's "Sex Machine", tho I image the godfather of soul would want some "royalties" off the back- (and front-) end...
Hmmm, anti-script word image: envelop
Envelop me with yo' robo-love, botby...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I was more interested in the company's t-shirts. I think they have one that says "people making people". The "my other girlfiend is a realdoll" one is more creepy, though.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Why would anybody put so much work into this? Does Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro really have that big a problem finding a date?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The "perfect" bodies for these cyborgs are already available:l ery.htm :-)
https://secure.pmoon.co.jp/TOUSHINDAI/gallery/gal
and she'll meet all 7 of MINE!
And Japan is decidely not a Christian nation, I understand the Christian population of Japan is around 2%. Coincidence?
Kibuki-Cho
Butt, is there enough room for "Space Balls"?
Or, Rem from Logan's Run(s)?
hah... viewable
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I think it's time the honorable Professor put to the test the theory that "no technical innovation can truly take hold until it is embraced by the pornography industry."
Pr0nb0t!
-- Mojo Tooth : exploring our world as only an idiot can.
This is basically a real doll with a motor... would renting these things out in electric brothels even be technically illegal? New laws will no doubt have to be passed.
Caption:Professor Ishiguru (r) stresses the importance of appearance
Actually those hands looks suspiciously like they were photoshoped in. Something must have been seriously wrong to have to digitialy edit the photo to look that bad... I mean, they added the hairy man hands to cover something else up...? perhaps they havn't made the rubber skin for her hands yet, and they're covering them up with photoshop for the story. Which only leads me to wonder... Does she have "skin" on the parts that are covered by her clothes too? or did all the work on the outside appearance go into the face and hair? at any rate, it's a pretty remarkable job there anyway.
"All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors."
He can order himself a "sleep-over" friend and not have to go through anymore court cases.
Can she run a Nintendo Emulator?
Damn did anybody get a look a "Her" hands.somebodys got a bad case of man hands!
She's sitting too far into the Uncanny Valley for me.
Truly hilarious. Where are the mod points when I need them? MOD PARENT UP!
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
...my GIRL robot. This will be the best prom ever...
This is a joke... it is a re-tooled version of The Hacker's Manifesto
You know, it's not like robots are so unique...
I was told by some head hunters when they were training for how to do sucessful job interviews that studies have shown that women who are very attractive are sometimes discriminated *against* by people. That is one of the reasons that they will tell people to dress well, but on the conservative side for job interviews.
Maybe it has to do with people not wanting to create the perception that they hired someone because they were attracted to them? Or, it could be that they are trying to repress their own feelings, or whatever.
Likewise, in some cases, if you had a beautiful female robot, some people would perhaps be repulsed because they would be trying to deny their feelings of attraction.
Finally, I bet there are some people out thier are repulsed by homosexuals as a way to repress their own feelings.
This doesn't imply that there should not be pretty women, homosexuals, or realistic robots. It just means that people have feelings for complicated reasons.
But, in any case, kids these days will hardly bat an eyelash at an android. It's really only people in certain psychographic groups that would be uncomfortable. Remember when you were afraid to turn on the computer for fear of breaking it? Well, there are still people like that in the world. But, there are a whole lot more people who aren't like that then ever before. And those people like the thought of a realistic robot.
Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
Gynoid? But I thought it was female... wouldn't grlnoid be better?
Pictures of Repliee. The android behind her doesn't appear too lifelike, though.
It appears that the Osaka lab has been /.ed.
Might be interesting once everything settles down.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
I am just wondering, because what if they are modelled after a Japanese woman as well?
"It can respond to people touching it. It's very satisfying"
I... see.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I'm sure isolationism and urban over-population has something to do with it. Who wants to have kids when you're sharing a 700 sq ft apartment with your husband and both his parents.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
Look, it doesn't need to think, walk a balance beam (or walk well at all), dance, ride a bike, or anything.
All it needs to do is suck and fuck, and they'll make an absolute fortune.
Hmmm, Nexx,
I am of a dark variety ethnicity. I spent 3 months in Japan, from Dec 1 to Feb 24. I didn't experience ANY racisim that I could discern.
I have been interested in Japan since childhood (from a naval perspective) and off-and-on tried to study Nihongo since 1992 (but am always distracted by other activities).
In Kibuki-Cho, a kid on a bike turned round the corner of a 100 yen store too fast. The handlebars struck me in the waist or pelvis, and he immediately profusely pleaded, "Gomen Nasai. Gomen. Gomen." I was thrilled. I was not even fazed by being hit by the bike. I was amazed and impressed and happy that my first "crash" was funny to me, and informative. If racism were so rampant, he could have just shrugged and moved on.
I met many new Japanese friends in Rappongi (of course, in expat-land), male and female, who enjoyed conversing with me, engaging in banter, and one of my favorite new friends is Atsumi, at one of the StarBux, who, when she saw some of my art and my databases on my laptop and my plans as I explained them to her, would say (in typical girl-response), "Nehhhh, neehhhh, nehhhhh..." while waving her finger and smiling. That was cool, exciting, funny, to me.
I was at Shibuya, switching from Namboku out of Azabu-juban, to Ebisu to Shibuya. I walked off the train, staring up at the digital directions. A well-dressed senior gentleman presumed I was lost. I wasn't quite lost, as I'd been on that route only once before, having visited a friend in Miyamaedaira. He offered me directions to the proper track, and when I failed to understand the city name he referred to, he apologized and said, "Oh, in the old days, that's what we used to call it. I used to work with the US Army, as a civilian..."
Another time, during stay, I heard and then heard more and more expats and Asians from the region professing warm feelings toward young and older Japanese who would go out of their way to assist foreigners.
Another time, when a Singaporean and I were going on a long train ride, we stopped at KFC I think in Asakusa (for you readers who don't know, pron it is as "ahsah-k'sah or maybe ahsahk-sah). Earlier, we realized we'd better get the directions down pat before eating, so we stopped into the ticket office for the old-style train upstairs. Not ONE, but FOUR employees, android-and-Borg like (hive-worker that is, not malevolence, hehe) double-checked information we gave, by repeating back to us. Then, #1 looked at #2 and nodded in agreement, then #1 & #2 worked with us, then referred to #3 then #4, and #4 and #3 nodded back, though seemingly junior in status, then #1, #2, #3 and #4 all stood professionally, giving us directions with #1 doing most of the info-feed-delivery. It was a bit touching, and somewhat amusing (maybe because my brain and soul like those special nuances that go beyond "do the minimum/go back to doin' my thing before I was interrupted"), and will be etched indelibly in my mind.
I made a number of friends in Japan, some of whom approached me out of the blue. I had no problems with homeless kids or adults, no problems on the train (yeh, I could doze off and my stuff would be right next to me when I woke up). I dropped my cell once, and dropped other things at times, and people would tug me and apologize and hand the things to me. (Well, I did lose my cheapo MetroPCS phone at BART in either SFO or Burlingame the day I returned, and it took about 1.5 to 2 weeks to retrieve it, fortunately.)
I find Japan (I can't speak too much to other place that I've not seen or not seen in a while) colorful, fun, party-animal-like (OK, Tokyo and Yokohama areas, at least), and more. (And, it's nice to know that Red Hat has an office in Roppongi, across from the ABC (Aoyama Book Center) store. )
Now, I am not for one second going try to "poo-poo" the condition of racism by saying it doesn't exist. I have read about Burakumin, and I even made Korean friends, Chinese friends, and others who actually LIVE IN Japan as residents or students. As f
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
From the Real Dolls FAQ:
Question: What sort of people buy REALDOLL?
REALDOLL customers include futurists, artists, art collectors, film-makers, scientists, health professionals, housewives -- you name it.
Ummm.. yeah.
Was wondering when this was going to appear on Slashdot.
When I first saw this on another site, I did a bit of surfing around and found the Kokoro-Dreams site that has a few pictures and (more importantly) videos of the ladies in action.
All but one of these is in WMV format and the other is a Real Media file. I would have Coral-Cached this whole site, but they've implemented some nasty referer checking and it won't work.
So instead, I Cached the individual video files for your enjoyment:
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/WMV/
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/WMV/
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/real
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/WMV/
There's also this Japanese PDF file (not many pictures):
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp.nyud.net:8090/ng/a
If you're interested in surfing around the original Japanese site, you can do so here:
http://www.kokoro-dreams.co.jp/
. . . it looks too much like my ex-wife.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
The other thing to remember is that many humans fall into the uncanny valley, through disease or disability. We have enough social conditioning in place that lets us get over that, and talk to people. If her conversation was intellignet, I think the humans psychological response would be the same as talking to someone with a motor-control disease of some kind.
Abolish Copyright. Restore Freedom.
I should have also mentioned that:
And given the predilections of the stereotypical geek, standing up or walking around isn't high on the list of the postures that they would be wanting a gynoid to assume...
Classic geekoid commercial
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The concept you are describing has been dubbed the "Uncanny Valley" and has been studied since the late 70s.
I wonder if this relates to xenophobia.
I have speculated that humans (like many other animals) may have a drive to attack competitors for their eco niche - either divergent populations of the same species or members of other species (ala cats-and-dogs, or the way bobcats try to wipe out all other peredators in their territories).
If such a drive exists it would involve attacking those that are "similar but somewhat different" while avoiding those that are "really close".
This could help explain the ease with which tribal warfare and racial conflict can be incited, along with the tendency of propaganda to dehumanize the targets, characterizing them as animal-like (thus in the valley rather than the nearby peak), in preparation for inciting violence against them. Racial/ethnic/religious tolerance would consist of identifying other humans as on the near side of the valley despite markers like language/accent, color and shape differences, and culture-driven behavioral distinctions.
It might also explain why several higher apes can handle all human language skills except vocal speech: If talking aloud put them "in the valley" it might have incited competitor-for-niche-attack behavior from humans, selecting against vocal speech in those ape and hominid species where it was scattered and wiping out those where it was entrenched.
There's another uncanny valley - at least I think it's separate - in politics and religion: Sects that are closest fight the hardest. IMHO this easily explained as a malfunction of the social-pressure mechanisms that promote conformity within the group.
In a single group a member whose opinions have a divergence will be pressured to change the divergent opinion - "file down the rough spot" as it were. A holder of a divergent opinion on an "important issue" will find little social support, and is likely to question and change the divergence rather than abandon the group's support.
If there are two groups with NEARLY identical ideologies, members of each group are likely to interpret members of the other as members of their own with a divergent opinion, and bring social pressure to bear to correct the divergence. But the target has a social support network of his own. So he neither "corrects" the divergence nore abandons the other characteristics that identify him as a member of HIS group, and NEARLY a member of the other. Failure makes the social pressure escalate. Iterate over all interactions between members of the two groups. Eventually each interprets the other as a collection of heritics attempting to destroy their own core values. Thus the fight is on.
Members of groups whose ideologies are sufficiently different that they recognize themselves as divergent are beyond the valley: Other ideologies to be dealt with on friendly terms when this is useful but not evil/heritical/demonic cabals within one's own group attempting to destroy the group.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Methinks my fantasies I had while watching that show might come true here in a few years....
"Professor Ishiguro believes that it may prove possible to build an android that could pass for a human [for] 5-10 seconds.'"
Sadly, that's all I'd need.
I have to say that you and Nexx are both right, as contradictory as that might sound at first reading.
I am caucasian, and lived and worked in Japan for nearly a decade. After I married my (Vietnamese) wife, she also lived in Japan for a while.
During my time in Japan, I sometimes encountered racism. Most often of the "benign" type; that is, people (who have usually seldom if ever interacted with a foreigner) assuming that all foreigners cannot speak Japanese well if at all, cannot (if they are non-Asian) use chopsticks, don't know to take their shoes off when entering a house, that sort of things, only to be surprised to find that I speak Japanese well, can use chopsticks more "correctly" than many Japanese, and knew and followed typical Japanese customs, both in others' homes and in my own. I have a problem with even calling this racism; mostly, it's just ignorance.
Occassionally, I encountered real racism, such as people trying to provoke a fight with me because I was a foreigner, business that will not server foreigners, that sort of thing, but it was really not very common. Most Japanese are very kind, very helpful, and very honest, as you experienced.
My wife's experiences were similar to mine, except one is the inverse: people would assume that because she is Asian, she could speak Japanese well (most non-Japanese Asians in Japan do) and I couldn't even count the number of times that Japanese reacted with surprise to see me interpreting Japanese for her rather than the other way around.
Now that we have returned to the United States, it's unlikely we will ever live in Japan again. We have kids and a house and jobs here and all that. But if the opportunity were to some day arise to return to Japan for a while when our kids are older, we'd probably both jump at the chance. On balance, we have a huge collection of fond memories of Japan and not very many unpleasant ones. The worst thing there for me would actually be the relatively cold winter weather (compared to southern California) or for her the hot, humid summers (which I love but she does not).
However, there are other ethnic groups who might have a different take. I'm told that south Asians experience a lot more racism in Japan than caucasians or other east Asians do.
Finally, with regard to an earlier poster's comment about a third generation Japanese Korean who did not have Japanese citizenship, there are many of them. Mostly, their grandparents were brought to Japan as slave laborers before or during WW II. They gained citizenship at the time but had it stripped away again after the war. The current status of Japanese Koreans is that they may acquire Japanese citizenship, but many of them choose not to, because of the discrimination of the past (and present) and the circumstances under which their families were brought to Japan. There are those who make much of the fact that there are Korean-Japanese who do not hold Japanese citizenship, but they always seem to gloss over the fact that it's voluntary; it is no longer imposed by the state. Most of those who refuse Japanese citizenship maintain ROK citizenship, but some of them hold DPRK citizenship and there is intense rivalry between those camps.
Just to bitch...I still havent figured out why a story get's rejected, and then accepted/posted the next day. Schizophrenic IMHO.
I think any of us understand that a disturbingly realistic-looking, attractive female android is going to draw snickering comments from the peanut gallery, but the fact draws on some issues that are a bit deeper than if she has any penetratable orifices. "Consciously, it is easy to see that she is an android, but unconsciously, we react to the android as if she were a woman." This is probably the most important line of the entire article to me. Not only does it draw reference to the holy grail of the Uncanny Valley concept, but it has massive implications of how our society (and Japan's) views women. Japan's views about women are largely changing for the better in recent decades, but there is still a somewhat pervasive expectation of them to be silent, obedient, and malleable to the desires of the male populace. United States culture *ostensibly* disregarded this notion for the most part 30 years ago (cynicism aside, relative sex equality is what most Americans believe is a good thing), and the rampant mysoginy and sexism of the past is (in daylight) relegated to Slashdot half-jokes about ANY female representation being primarily sexual. Now, a Japanese scientist has created a pretty android, essentially because he believes appearance is the master force driving acceptance of robotics in society. We are therefore presented with a piece of design saturated with the sexism of its home culture, batting its eyelashes and such (if he had created a male android, would it hit on women or something? Surely not). And, finally, the creation reaches our computer screens. Most of the resultant discussion is about sex, not robotics. And when robotics IS discussed, it's within the context of sex robots! What, exactly, does this say about our culture? Would realistic female androids truly be a good thing for us? Would it be a good thing for actual women? For a moment, think seriously.
How about if you had two of them linked together remotely? Would there be the same objection to remotely interacting with your wife/girlfriend/SO (you would each be with a model of the other)? In order for a remote system to reasonably handle the comm delay there would need to be some degree of autonomy. That's another step removing the system from absolute exact response, although it would have to learn so as to more carefully match reality. Now how about if a machine in the center learned the interactions to a much higher degree and then could run a simulation? The lines could get blurry here pretty quickly!
It's the commercial called "Geek", found here
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Women have all the cool sex toys. Its time men got some too!
Props to the Coward, for remixing the manifesto in a ridiculous way.
Shits to the actual manifesto, for being the most self-indulgent piece of writing ever created.
And shits to Dossy, who thinks not having read some wanker's tripe is the True Mark of the Lame. Shame on you, Dossy.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Can she move her hands in a rapid up/down motion?
Real Dolls look kinda freaky to me. The android actually crosses the line to looking realistic to me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Coercive. Forgive me- it was the argument, not the misspelled word.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
> She can only sit though at present...
Hey, she only needs to sit and look alive to be very useful -- so long as she can do her sitting in a car, in the HOV lane!
I guess it might be an issue if she's sitting around in your parked car all the time. She'd need to be able to hide, too.
And it might also be a problem if lots of people start to do this with the same model android.
This reminds me of the old movie with Melanie Griffith, "Cherry2000" where Griffith is working as a tracker and takes some dude to a junkyard for sex robots to find a new memory chip to replace the one in his broken sexbot. A cool movie-- says a lot about the absurdity of dealing with HUMAN females.
When I saw the headline "Female Android" I was shocked to only see 592 posts. I think if they had included the words "Space", "Microsoft", and "Porn" there would be well over 3,000 posts on this topic.
This article isn't about robots; it's about mannequins.
What intrigued me and pleased me was that a sales person at Yodabashi in Shinjuku (the exit west of JR station, almost on the corner, but I forget the street name) spent an HOUR discussing with me the phone I was going to buy. I told him I wanted a "sexy" phone, one that has nice features/gizmos. He didn't at first get "sexy", so I said, "Echi". Then I pointed to various models, distinguishing between "echi", "not echi", and then in seconds he caught one, steering me to the "echi" phones. It boiled down to Sharp, and I got the one Vodafone offered, the 402SH. It has the (sharp, hehe pun intended) TV, 1.3 megapixel camcorder, ringtones that I can change the pitch/octaves of, and more.
It was one of the most informative sales transactions I've ever experienced.
Of course, I have the name card holder, and sometimes here in the states I whip it out of my Uniqlo hip pouches I usually wear on my belt.
I WISH Uniqlo would have selected SF instead of New Jersey to open their first states-side store. But, no matter. When I am back working, I can send money to my friends there and tell them what to send me.
What I really like about what I think is normal in Japan and abnormal in the US is that in Japanese stores you can shoot pic of the QR codes, and probably the bar codes, off of flyers and and maybe even in the store and find the stuff you need and order it. I didn't actually TRY to shot QR pics in Uniqlo, except maybe the one on my receipt. I do know that some stores in Japan, and probably BIGTIME in the US, shooting pics even if you plan to purchase the thing you like/need/want risks ejection or a polite "no pictures".
I do understand, however the the Azabu-juban police do take a keen interest in watching African/Nigerian guys who hang out on corners. Funny thing is is that some of them are legit, and only retrieving friends or guests, the the JCops will shadow them up and down the street, snap pics and such. I don't PERSONALLY know if I myself were being shadowed, but I a habit of abruptly stopping and beaming in a direction I think someone is using as a vantage point. Sometimes, I (in Japan or in the US) would whip out my camera and mock shoot or actually shoot a pic, but I never got haggled.
People everywhere I went seemed pleasant, even at an Onsen in Nikko.
What I find interesting is that parents and their kids seem to have a better bond and flair for wild dressups than here. I've seen little kids as young as maybe 5 walking alone to and from school, despite Gov. Ishihara Shintaro's exhortations that most crime in Tokyo is due to foreign elements from China and elsewhere. If that were true, I suspect the parents would never let their kids walk around alone in Azabu-juban, or expat land, especially with all the soul-like clubs and sailorly spots 'merkun expats frequent. (I'm not a cop, and I don't have access to crime states for Tokyo proper, but somehow, I don't think ALL the crime, not even 50% is done by foreigners. Crime is everywhere, and race or gender and citizenship status probably pale compared to just having no food, no shelter, no job, and the like. I DO know that some westerners abuse the immigration/visitor status, and they pisse me off because I was trying to stay there legitimately, and these jerks are part of the problem forcing Japan to tighten up her immigration laws and labor policies. I sure wish they'd officially allow "unskilled, but imminently useful, unrestricted" labor for people like me who just want to long-term live and work there without deriving, expecting, or scheming any undeserved or unauthorized benefits. I'm not a criminal, not on any warrants lists that I know of, don't belong to any whacko, fringe or extremist groups, never been cuffed, even. Yet, governments see so many criminals who appeared clean before they finally were caught, and so they operate or make policies that treat persons as guilty until they show creds or skill that can be "appropriately" absorbed, and even then, there are time limits imposed.)
Yeh, I hope my future
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
See this article debunking those commonly published setiments:
t ml
i 03/marr2.html
http://www.debito.org/christianscimonitor120604.h
Also, see the original statistics (in Japanese):
http://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/sui
The short version is that Japanese overwhelmingly marry other Japanese (704152 out of 740191 or 95.1% of marriages in 2004). Of those who don't marry Japanese, more are Japanese men marrying non-Japanese women (27881 or 3.7% of men) versus the other way around (8158 or 1.1% of women). Plus, the Japanese men who marry foreigners marry mostly Chinese, Korean, Filipino, or Thai women. Very few (less than 1%) are to British or American women.
Anyway, so it's a bit misleading of you to say that Japanese men prefer caucasian women when 96.3 percent of Japanese men who married last year married Japanese women and 99% of those who didn't married other asian women.
My other first post is car post.
Shits to the actual manifesto, for being the most self-indulgent piece of writing ever created.
How can it be self-indulgent if it doesn't speak the mind of one person, but a million? And it does speak the mind of a million. Probably several million. Several million all alike. Several million who now know you're not one of us.
The manifesto is true for us from the beginning to the end. And just where the heck is it self-indulgent? Where?? Are you really so naive as to believe people wish you well?
All rites reversed 2010
It's sad .... this remix is almost funny.
And then it has to have absolute crap in it - "I'm much smarter than most of the other kids and especially girls" and "My crime is that of being too intelligent for girls who may call me "a needy and insecure sociopath" but they perfectly realize that they just feel stupid with me because I am so intelligent even at the age of fourteen and they know that I am a genius. I am too good for women."
There are plenty of girls who are geniuses. There are some girls who are nerds (I'm one; I'm 20, and I've been coding since I was 13.) The smartest person in the world, according to IQ tests (a flawed metric, but not entirely baseless) is a woman (Marilyn Vos Savant). The first programmer, by some metrics, was a woman (Ada Lovelace.) There are female kernel hackers, chip designers, etc....
The article mentions that she does all that with 31 actuators. Really, she's got 30 too many, and only needs one...
...for vibrating
I think that loqi wasn't saying that there are no people whom that manifesto can describe but that those people are pathetic losers who'd rather bitch and moan and criticize the entire world just because they are to stupid to learn how to live in that world. I know that you don't wish me well because you hate me for getting laid but the hate is not the answer. Just learn how to be successful with the ladies and get over it. You can bitch all day long but will it change anything? If you are not happy with your life then just fucking do something about it man. If you are so smart then surely you can handle the most basic thing that humans were doing since they were monkeys, by which I mean mating, right? Right? Smart boy?
...does she eat old people's medicine for fuel?
Well, perhaps people still try to homestead, but land certainly is not free for the taking, and hasn't been free for the taking since 1976.
As the BLM says, "Congress abolished homesteading in 1976 with passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which made it national policy to retain the public lands in Federal ownership."
Hardly, this has little to do with that. One of the main reasons they have population problems is because there are far more males born then females. Gender imbalance and other things in the population are the real issue here, of course this being slashdot pithy reasonings like the above seem more logical. However, the research shows otherwise:
The sex ratio at birth in Japan is 1.05 males/female. This is pretty standard really. Canada, the US, Mexico, and most other countries have a 1.05 sex ratio at birth.
The 1.05 ratio is the reason that a 2.10 'replacement rate' is said to give zero population growth in the long term. E.g., suppose you have a society of 105 men and 95 women. The females would need to produce an average of about 200 / 95 = 2.1 children per woman over their lifetimes in order to replace the population exactly.
This is the same for all countries with this sex ratio. So it does not explain why Japan's population structure is different from other nations.
China, OTOH, has a ratio of 1.12 males/female. Presumably this is due to a pretty significant sex bias in the rates of abortion and unreported infanticide. This will have some effect in the years to come.
No. I understand that other peoples' indifference is a fact of life. It's self-indulgent the same way that a lot of "outcast" teen blogs are self-indulgent... plenty of moaning about how terrible it is, how unfair it is, how they've done nothing wrong. Sure, lots of people feel this way. But you know what? That's fucking life. Be thankful you were born with a brain worthy of society's contempt. Moaning about it solves nothing. Mentor's Manifesto is self-indulgent in the self-pity circle-jerking it inspires.
But if his pretentious drivel strokes your ego and makes you feel righteous in your victimization, by all means, stay in the circle.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
The 36% figure for New York would be about 99.5% if we counted all the people whose families mostly immigrated in the last 4 generations.
Nearly all my family has been here since before the Revolution (which incidentally used to be the meaning of the words "native american"). You can hardly find such people anywhere in the Northeast anymore. The original American culture is getting diluted, and this has been happening since the late 19th century. It has gotten to the point that "early-settling American" is the one background that you aren't allowed to mention - there isn't even a real name for us. If you are related to most of the Plymouth settlers who left descendants, Dutch patroons, Scots servants, English Cavaliers and Quakers, Pennsylvania Germans, and so forth, all over 250 years ago, you'll have to say you're a "mutt" or something similar rather than having an honorable word that can't be claimed by anybody with citizenship. Frankly, I don't regard people who can claim an ethnicity as entirely American, and I think the proper use of "American" without hyphens or qualifiers should imply that one is fully part of the original culture which began here in the colonial and Revolutionary eras.
Now the cultures of Europe are getting overrun as well. Like ecological diversity, cultural diversity can only be maintained if you don't transplant species / people wholesale between ecosystems / cultures. The Japanese are right to severely limit immigration - the only alternative is eventually losing their cultural identity.
So when will a cyborg/robot like Six on "Tripping the Rift" be ready???
Homer no function beer well without.
I'm curious: Can she charge up a storm on her credit cards? Can she avoid having sex for weeks at a time. Can she talk on the phone for hours to a long-distance friend in Japan? Can she drive without endangering the lives of others?
At least she doesn't come with in-laws.
There I met a woman who had lived in Japan all her life, but was the grand parents of imported Korean labor. She was a legal resident, but not a citizen.
It is her fault. The way the kaw works, all she would have to do is give up her Korean name and korean passport. I know tons of people who have done it, and who have NOT done it because theier korean name means to omuch to them. All Japanese citizens have to have "approved" Japanese names, even the Japanese themselves. They can't name thier kid anything they want.
You might prefer to be arrested.
See the look on that scientist guys face! It says "I'm gonna get me a piece tonight!"
"I have never been so happy..."
Lon Duc Dong
Sixteen Candles
the "this guy needs a girld friend" joke.
cause you can't...
he has one now...
he made her...
so i mean, you can't really make that joke...
it wouldnt be very funny.
All rites reversed 2010
Dust settling, the manifesto wasn't written for the hordes. It was written for the peers. Guess who's opinion it is which is worth a damn.
All rites reversed 2010
Yours? Wait, I'm sorry, did you just effectively say "It's popular with the right people" in its defense?
There's a difference between righteous indignation and masturbatory self-pity. There's a difference between poetic statement and adolescent indulgence. The only thing accomplished by stereotyping authority in a serious piece of writing is a dumbing down of the discourse.
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Oh, right. If I enjoy sex then obviously any intellectual or artistic pursuits must absolutely mean nothing to me, I must lack any sense of brotherhood and most of all hate progress because this bad sex thing kills everything that is good and makes baby Jesus cry!
I'll give you a little hint: I am a very happy, 28 years old man. I love my life. I love myself. I love beautiful women and yes, I love making love -- you should give it a try, it's not that hard.
I never bitch like this pathetic script kiddie "The Mentor" in his childish Loser Manifesto. If you think that you are so great then for God's sake get a life and fucking enjoy it! Stop bitching already!!!
Funniest post on this thread, its on 0, and I have no mod points. What a tragedy.
There's more to it than that.
You've probably noticed that sometimes politicians wear so much makeup that their robot double would already look indistinguishable from them at a distance. Would a robot giving a speech at a political convention come across as being more intelligent than the real person, less intelligent, or the same? I don't think the audience would be able to tell the difference, especially after their hangovers.
The next question is, if the robots are smarter than the politicians, are these robots going to be our new overlords?
I'm not sure what exactly you do for a living, but if you don't mind working for the DoD, the number of jobs available (especially on Okinawa) are absolutely amazing. There is just such a large military presence and so many support jobs. They're not a terrible employer, and there is a lot of fun to be had in Okinawa. It's a little smaller and less party-like than mainland, but I've always found it worthwhile.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Combine her with a Real Doll!
Could turn out to be a sensational ThinkGeek item!
@peetm
you decide http://www.hotornot.com/r/?eid=EQBERUO&key=HTL
i am huked on fonics.
It's been a long time.
There once was a site called 'we hurt the ones we love' about Real Doll repair. Oh the humanity.
I submitted this story over a month ago (2005.06.28 17:50) but got it rejected (by CmdrTaco, I think, "on duty" at around that time) double-quick. I wonder whether I offended him by using Companion Suitable for Slashdotters Almost Ready as the title of the submission. :)
Aye 'ave gno plobrem w/ mspelled werds. but both people arguing about it kept spelling it incorrectly- pushed a button. 4ghiphe mne
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I should reiterate: *I* am huked on foniks.
:P
I am one of the two people arguing.
It's been a long time.
^^^ Inbred ugly person ^^^
Keep your purity. Diversity wins pretty strongly over purity over any decent amount of time.