“My reaction to seeing this robot kicked paralleled what I would have had if I’d seen a video of a pack mule or a real big dog being kicked like that, and (from anecdotal conversations) I know I’m not the only one with that kind of immediate response. True, it wasn’t nearly as strong a shocked feeling for me as it would have been with a real animal, but it was definitely of the same character. It simply felt wrong.”
This throws an interesting light on the “robot rights” debates that keep surfacing. While I think we can all agree that a non-sentient machine doesn’t require the vote or union-mandated coffee breaks, this sort of psychological reaction to machines with a visual semblance of life may cause problems in early-adopter workplaces. [image by TwoBlueDay]
We’re all about the plausible end of near-future science fiction here at Futurismic, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get a sordid guilty kick out of some lurid old-school pulp material every once in a while. So many thanks to cuddly comics curmudgeon Warren Ellis for bringing the Pulp Of The Day blog to my attention – schmaltzy old pulp fiction covers for your eyeball delights, forsooth!
While it’s generally becoming more accepted that exercise is a good thing that we should all do more of, the good folk at Toshiba are still designing with the couch potato very much in mind.
“ApriPoko sits in the living room and waits for you to use a remote control. When its sensors detect infrared rays emitted by a remote, the robot speaks up: “What did you just do?” it asks. Tell ApriPoko what you did (”I turned on the stereo” or “I changed to channel 321,” for example), and it commits the details to memory. Then, next time you want to turn on the stereo or change the channel, simply tell ApriPoko and it transmits the appropriate IR signal directly to the device.”
We may not have our long-promised robot butlers yet, but ApriPoko should at least take on the duties that most of us relied on our younger siblings to perform … [image lifted from linked Pink Tentacle article]
Conventions are the social backbone of the science fiction scene, and the old adage says that there’s always one taking place somewhere. Question is, how do you locate them?
John Joseph Adamssuggested some fan with web-smarts should step into the breach and knock together a website for locating conventions by US zip code, and within less than a day Nathan Lilly (who is also the editor of SpaceWesterns.com, by the way) had done exactly that with Con Finder.
Who says fandom can’t get things done quickly, eh? Now, Nathan, if you could just upgrade it to global coverage – let’s say by Sunday night?
Here’s another bioethics question that’s probably no less contentious than the deaf baby issue. Thomas Beattie is legally married to a woman called Nancy. Nothing unusual there; what’s unusual is that Thomas is transgender – he’s now legally counted as a man, but was previously female. So far, so good.
“Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.”
In this instance, I find my own attitudes very clear cut – I have no problems with this at all. But I imagine the anti-gay-marriage crowd will be pretty upset about it, which brings us to a question familiar to transhumanist thinkers and readers of feminist science fiction alike – is “gender” a function of genetics, of psychology or of society? [via BoingBoing]
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Jamais Cascio is a sensitive soul; he doesn’t like seeing beasts of burden being abused and pushed around. Even robotic ones:
