South Korea to Build Robot Theme Parks
coondoggie writes "South Korea officials today said they hope to build two robot theme parks for $1.6 billion by 2013. The parks will feature a number of attractions that let visitors interact with robots and test new products. "The two cities will be developed as meccas for the country's robot industry, while having amusement park areas, exhibition halls and stadiums where robots can compete in various events," the ministry said. The theme parks are not a big surprise because South Korea loves its robots. Earlier this year the government of South Korea said it was drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots — and vice versa."
i for one welcome our fun loving robotic overlords!!
Nothing can possibl-y go wrong.
Whos going to get the first joke.
No flash photography.
Is this a serious issue in South Korea? I am no robotics expert, but I did read a lot of Asimov, and I'm not sure we are quite to that point yet. What we currently call "machine intelligence" is not quite up to the intelligence level of a cockroach. It is more pattern matching and optimization than anything; not much room for ethical standards.
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
The parks will feature a number of attractions that let visitors interact with robots and test new products.
Either "new products" means "interactive tentacle hentai", or I'm not interested.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I think they mean we can't have freaky sex with robots.
to take an ample supply of cameras (with good batteries for the flash).
This is just plain offensive. I don't see any parks opening up where robots can go to interact with humans and test new robot products. It just makes me sick, you know... what do they think robots are, anyway? Our Slaves? Ugh.
"See all that stuff inside, Homer? That's why your robot never worked!"
Will these theme parks have stairs and will the robots try to protect us from the terrible secrets of Space?
Why the hell do robots need to go to a theme park?
Are they becoming very depressed?
Will it have hookers? And blackjack?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
The Powers That Be have announced that the coming 4th season is the last season of Battlestar Galactica. Maybe...they have something to hide. Something they don't want people to think about.
Now we know why. The Cylons DO have a plan. It's to build a theme park.
A robotic themepark? Do people really want to go to a park to hang out with robots or are they all just hoping for a ride on the Number Six?
the first time a robot goes wrong and rips the head off an unsuspecting customer is when this theme park dies.
reminds of one of the early robot demonstrations - somebody else can track down the reference, I need to do some work - it was in the 60s/70s and "robot" was a very loose definition. what it did was replay programmed movements - there was no intelligence or decision making. they had programmed it to open a fridge and get a bottle of drink and offer it to the customers. all was well, until on day the wind blew the fridge door shut. the robot then easily punched his "hand" through the door of the fridge and offered the customer the whole fridge having simply picked it up instead. being offered an entire fridge by a 6 ton hydraulic arm was not the amusing, hi-tech spectacle the customer had been expecting...
the moral is, something always goes wrong. always. with most automation in factories the worst that will happen is a badly built car and a delay on the production lines whilst they remove the ford fiesta with ten doors. add humans to the mix and people will get hurt. or sue. or both.
>are they all just hoping for a ride on the Number Six?
I am not a number, I am a free ma...
Aww crap. Wrong meme.
To be honest, i'd rather have a ride on Seven of Nine...
Indeed, the ethics requirements should be on the makers of the robots, not on the robots. Even very stupid (i.e., lacking in any semblance or even attempt at artificial intelligence) computer programs can have ethical issues--transmitting or storing inappropriate information, computing faulty values, or giving bad advice are simple examples.
And fanciful notions of the unique nature of positronic brains aside, the set of things you can program for robots is pretty much the same as the set of things you can program for other computers, only the peripherals are different. And like their less animated counterparts, most robot ethical issues, for now, are things that need to be handled at design, development, and debugging time... not at runtime. And most responsibility for problems needs to be traced back to there.
The actual area where we're likely to see problems won't be in the robots themselves, it will be in our propensity to want to give up our judgment to computers. Computer viruses were largely not enabled by people who wrote them--programs didn't originally just start on their own on a computer--you had to manually start them. But people got tired of that. They didn't like pressing buttons that said "Show me the picture in this email message" or "Run the installation program on this disk." and they wanted it done for them. That desire to yield responsibilty for judgment to a mindless computer is what got us in trouble, not the computer's desire to do us harm.
The first car to run over a pedestrian while parking it won't have done so because the robot was too eager to drive before it had been properly trained. It will be because the robot was too stupid to know it isn't just a toaster (see The Measure of a Man), coupled with the fact that some programmer was too eager to show off his toy, or perhaps because some park guest was too willing to try untested technology, or because some quality assurance person was too afraid to hold up the opening of the park, or because some politician thought it was cool to talk of computer ethics instead of human ethics.
Ethics and laziness don't go well together. And we're a pretty lazy lot, we humans. I'd rank the probability that any lawmakers anywhere will ever require that robots not be built until they have ethics built in as so close to 0% as to be indistinguishable from it. People with cool toys to show off in the marketplace are not going to stand for that kind of thing.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
..nevermind
South Korea builds Meccas!
Oh my God! They killed...
Oh wait, Kenny is a robot!
He misses his ex-wife.
all of a sudden I want to watch I robot, read hitchhikers guide, watch the simpsons and futurama.... you guys are great
"I don't see any parks opening up where robots can go to interact with humans and test new robot products. "
Robodouche for that nice fresh squeaky feeling.
...to prevent human abuse of robots Does this mean I cannot...hmm..."love" my robot?When I was in Korea in late 70s every back alley had raw sewage running down the streets. Even in Itaewon/Seoul. "Pets" hanging from bridges (dinner). Hamburgers made of, get this, ham !! And don't get me started on kimchee breath. Good god almighty !! And the riots !! Students want to be friendly with the god-forsaken north. Doom is the result. Stupid students !! Lest I forget, I was there when Korea's president (would you believe, Park ??) was assasinated. In his own office !! And Korea wants to build a robot theme park. Sheez !! Number 10 !!
I didn't know that the population of robots was big enough in South Korea for this place to attract enough to stay in business!
They killed Yi!
You bastards!
Only old people worship the robotic overloards
..........FULL STOP.
You've got to listen to me. Elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run amok in an orgy of blood and kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
"Please do not feed the robots"
You know what this means? The Koreans is gearing up to invade China and Japan to pay them back for the millenia of oppression and invasions in the past!! They'll probably start off with North Korea just to test their powers as mecha warriors.
In Soviet Russia, seven of nine rides you!
Yes, my name is also Bort.
No one has ever gotten within 100 kilometers of it.
This city that you speak of, it is the Machine City, Zero One.
Jealousy...
i hear bunch of japanese yelling, "screw that! i am gonna build my own robo-park full of sex bots and dealer bots! no screw that too! I am gonna build a city full of cyborgs!
Pirates of the Caribbean, Haunted House, Hall of the Presidents, Haunted Tiki Room, Its a Small World, just to name a few. Tehse are continually refurbished.
Up in Wisconsin Dells, there's a place called the Tommy Bartlett Exploratory (formerly, Robot World), which has been around since the 1980s. Back when I was there in the early 90s, the place had a huge tour guided entirely by robots. Of course, to keep the kiddies interested, some of the "robots" featured were more or less a novelty crossing of Chuck E Cheese automation and the bots from Mystery Science Theater 3000. However, the place did feature a lot of legitimate robots and plenty of scientific stuff to explore.
Since then though, it seems like they did away with most of the gimmicks in favor of making it much more educational.
8==8 Bones 8==8
But 5 years ago, it would've only been $1.2B dollars. And this is ignoring the time value of money, so it likely would've been lower yet. In the past five years, the USD is roughly 3/4 of what it used to be compared to the South Korean Won (KRW). So $1.2B for two theme parks? $600Mil for one? Doesn't seem that outrageous to me....
There are already automatic sentry guns, robots in essence, but these don't guard against missles on open sea, they guard a border in what is still a war zone.
I think that is a very good time to start thinking about the ethics around robots. Not just how we treat robots, but how we allow them to treat us. What exactly should a robot confirm too before it can be allowed to harm a human being?
This doesn't require ethics. Currently we have dumb machines, if a car runs you over it is either because it has gone out of control and you are a victim of the laws of nature OR it is the fault of the human driver.
But what of a robot who can make decisions, how should it govern itself. Current robots are always setup as much as possible to avoid doing any harm whatsover. They are either behind safety gates, that cannot be opened while the robot is working and shut down the moment they detect an obstruction. This is an ethical choice in itself, we decided as human beings that it better to outfit robots in this way, rather then just put a sign "watch out". Current ethic is roughly "never knowingly risk causing harm, even at risk to oneself or ones task".
The gun sentry offcourse has a totally different task, how far should it go from being just a dumb automatic gun that fires at everything to a machine that makes choices. If it chooses when to fire, how certain should it be. When can it fire and when can't it fire.
There are other aspects as well, as medical technology becomes more advanced we get machines that will decide our treatment for us, I think it is equally important that we think of just what these machines can decide and when they should stop and call a human being.
Say that machine has been charged with deliving drugs to a person to keep that person alive, there is usually a fine line between the dose that benefits you, and the dose that kills you. How far should the machine be allowed to go? If a possible lethal dose MIGHT be what is necesarry to keep a person alive, would we allow that decision to be made by a robot OR should a human doctor make that decision.
In a way robot ethics has nothing to do with robot sentience, it is far closer to where do we put the decision making, in the hands of humans onthe spot, or a programmer who coded the decision making sometime during manufacturing.
Say you have a robot truck, it is driving on the highway, suddenly an obstacle appears, possible human. What should it do? We are thinking of automating driving, but why has no one thought of this ethical choice where a piece of software will have to choose between running someone over OR performing a dangerous manouver that might cause even more lives. Current machines have no choice, but if we add choice to themachine we need to think what we want it to decide.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Do not taunt the happy Yul Brynner Gunslinger Robot
you can no more abuse a robot than you could abuse a brick. The brick doesn't care and neither does a robot or vacuum cleaner. Passing laws to pander to stupid people is dangerous and takes a way proper freedoms and rightful liberties.
or are they all just hoping for a ride on the Number Six?
For the cost of an "E ticket"? Sure, I'll give it a whirl.
I can foresee famous hot women licensing the rights to their likenesses for big money.
The only true "no strings attached" sex is going to be with robots.
So... South Korea is in charge of Gundam?
I've programmed them to like it
...the start of a beowulf cluster of robot theme parks.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Is that so you can say, "Hey Seven of Nine, have seven of MINE!"? hehehhe
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park talking about the start-up woes of a theme park. ... Yes, but the Pirates of the Caribbean don't EAT the tourists.
Don't forget the extremely apropos "Robot Carnival", a collection of Japanese animated shorts from the 80's (one of which features a robot-themed amusement park).
Not trying to be troll but don't you think that human deserve the theme parks and giving robot's there own parks is just a bit too much ;)
Or is this really an Adult theme park featuring pleasure bots'?
Robots needs kick-ass mods too. Frickin' laser beam eyes!
I still may have an A ticket or two in a used ticket book....
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
a Human theme park to stop global robot domination.
I can see it now: "Please step this way to the rollercoaWHERE IS SARAH CONNOR?!"
>South Korea said it was drawing up a code of ethics to prevent human abuse of robots -- and vice versa WTF, go regulate your own ass! Whatever a fully grown adult and a fully certified robot do in a private bedroom is none of your government's f***ing business!
I initially thought this was going to be a theme park where robots
can go to spend their free time and 'wind down.' They could have fantasy
rides where robots are allowed to simulate, in a non-harmful way, egregious
breaking of Asimov's Three Laws...