Slashdot Mirror
The Best Robots of 2009
kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."
Support this: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ So we don't have to fight the closed systems like we did with the PC. Really, robotics is going through its early DIY stage, where most interesting stuff is built by hand using lots of modified parts. Anything we can do, as it moves into mainstream products, to keep the DIY rights to open the hardware and change the software if we want, helps our future freedom.
That's retarded. Germs devour and destroy each other as much or more than humans do. The difference is that germs are cheaper and faster to reproduce. Germs can go through several generations over the course of a week, so they're able to evolve much more quickly than larger animals and fill ecological niches more quickly and more efficiently. In addition, their population can explode over a very short time period. This means that when they find a resource they can exploit, they exploit it quickly and completely.
Forget the bullshit ideal that nature is loving and humans are brutal and warlike. Wherever there's a resource shortage there's fighting, whether it's humans or animals. The only difference is that humans can moderate it more effectively and then feel bad about it afterwards.
My point was that germs (and, well, animals in general) do it for survival.
Humans do it for sheer domination.
Yes, domination of resources and territory that allow the individual and his tribe to prosper. Groups of humans work with each other to out survive other groups of humans working with each other, just like any other animal. This behavioural pattern (instinct) to form competing tribes is found everywhere in nature from bacterial colonies to moon landings. The instinct "just is", it is neither good nor evil as it's responsible for bullets from an enemy, bandages from a friend and, no condoms from the pope's tribe.
IMHO the most remarkable thing about modern homo-sapiens is that an individual can belong to multiple tribes simultaneously. To my mind this very recent evolutional trait is what makes us unique.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Unionized, government street sweepers won't stand for mechanical sweepers that take their jobs."
Belive me the guy driving a street sweeper would defenitely prefer to be designing them.
The industrial revolution's success is based on the premise that automation allows society to progress. OTOH, it's basic failure is the current tradgedy of the commons. At fifty I have lost several jobs due to technology/social changes but I've made a good living from changing things with technology, and however small it may be I am changing society with this post.
The last time I was on a factory floor was the 80's, which in itself was quite a step up the food chain from a twenty-something "trailer park" day labourer with a wife and a kid. I recall reading at the time that the UK "metal workers(?)" union after months of fruitless negotiating had put a work ban on qualified fitters and turners performing any task that took less than X minutes to cycle (such as the metal press I was working in Australia). Their rationale was that any task that was that repetitive could be performed using a "one of a kind machine" by the same fitters and turners. This kind of thinking used to be called progressive, regardless of who it comes from.
Unions, Government and Big business (UGB) are all nessacary evils unless you can find somewhere to chase furry things with a stick and not be noticed, although don't expect to live much past your next severe tooth/throat/lung infection. When two or more of the "tribes" in UGB start swinging at each other the little guy is invariably trodden on in all the commotion. Yet like the abusive "parents" that they are, they will all tell you they love you dearly, it's the other parent who want's to, as Bill Cosby would once put it; "shoot you in the face with a bazzoka".
"This is where the problems begin. Like a fragile naked human pyramid, we are simultaneously supporting and resenting each other. We bitch out loud about our soul-sucking job as an anonymous face on an assembly line, while at the exact same time riding in a car that only an assembly line could have produced. It's a constant contradiction that has left us pissed off and joining informal wrestling clubs in basements." - David Wong, "The Monkeyshere".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.