Offbeat Geek

Honda has created a series of short documentary films called “Dream The Impossible“.  The series aims to celebrate “those who have the courage to turn failure into success, and to forge dreams into a better future.”

In one such short, Living with robots, we get a brief glimpse at the current development of robots and how it can help us in the future. It also brought up something of note.

Throughout the short they try to dispel the fact that modern real life robots are not like their movie counterparts.  A certain Schwarzenegger movie series is referenced multiple times.  They discuss the effects of the Uncanny Valley hypothesis (Masahiro Mori: when robots look and act almost like actual people it causes a very negative response any observing).

I posit that it is not just the physical but also the hypothesis of Technological Singularity ( Raymond Kurzweil: The exponential improvement described by Moore’s Law will lead to a time when progress in technology occurs almost instantly) which creates the greatest fear of robots.  Technological Singularity states it my soon be possible to build a machine that is fundamentally more intelligent than a human.   If/When this happens the machine itself could build an even more intelligent machine which would go on to do the same. This is referred to as Recursive Self Improvement.

It is this idea which ultimately leads us to: What happens to the human race at that point?

In essence, it will be down to how we handle the evolution (pardon the pun) of  Artificial Intelligence which will determine the future of robotics and how close or far it stays from the movies.   I do see Isaac Asimov’s laws making an appearance when we get to that stage.

Eye candy spetacular but have we seen it all before already?

Avatar, the new movie by James Cameron, comes out next week in the US.  Despite all the hype I can not seem to get motivated for this movie.  Maybe it’s just me but it seems to have borrowed too much of itself from other sources. Check it out:

1. The Battle for Tera.  Yes I know they are not entirely the same but the principle of a huge conflict between man and some peace loving aliens seems all too familiar. Especially when the one man falls for a female of the other species, changes sides, etc etc.
2. The Matrix. Do those Mech suits look like a “shiny”er version of those featured in “Revolutions”? Or is that just me? The Principle of the avatar itself? Residual Self Image perhaps? (I know its a bit of a stretch but with all the other similarities I had to put that one in) (continue reading…)