Robotics

[peter]

Tucking into a large bowl of white crab meat the other night it occured to me that every teaspoonfull of that delicious but friable textured produce, will need to have been picked by hand, gram by gram, flake by flake. Any body who has ever picked white meat from a crab will understand the formidable problems this process would pose to any form of mechanisation - the variation of size and position of the nooks and crannys from which the meat must be extracted would make the computing power required to achieve a sucessfull result enormous, let alone the delicacy of the mechanical proceedure required.

I realise however how little I actually understand about how far the field of 'robotics' has actually progressed [nb I'm not so much thinking AI here as actual performence of the physical tasks that to date provide employment for humans in huge numbers]. Can we [for example] set up a factory where a car is built from scratch, start to finish, by robots, with no other human intervention other than to oversee the machines that are actually making the car [and if so how long before even that second level of intervention will itself become mechanised].
Another area where my understanding is all but zero is what fields lend them selves to this kind of robotic intervention and which do not. I have perhaps identified the extremes [crab picking and car building], but where will the line be drawn - will for example a robot ever be able to sort the saffron stamens from a freshly picked crocus head; will medical surgury ever be performed safer and better than it is today by humans; what job will be truly 'safe' from the advance of robotic capabilities [being an author might be one that qualifies but once the springs and levers that tug the human emotions within the brain are better understood who knows].

Where are we now and where will we be in the near future [and how worried should we be.] Any thoughts?

[Zarathustra]

ATLANTA (CBS ATLANTA) – In a survey of changing attitudes between human beings and robots, nearly one-in-five people said they were “willing to have sex with an android,” despite more than one-third of respondents saying they fear machines will threaten the human race.

LOL. So they're scared of machines threatening the human race, but they'd totally hit that. [Yes, I understand that the two groups in the poll may not overlap. But it's funnier if you forget that for a second.]

link

When reminded that a vibrator is also having sex with a machine, the numbers jumped to over half (all the women plus some of the guys). When shown lady terminator from Terminator 3, the poll became virtually unanimous, respondants reporting that they really liked the adjustable boob feature, so they could go from the perky model look to motorboating fun in a matter of seconds.*


*commentary does not represent actual facts.

[peter]

Yes - when I was considering how I might be relieved of my more onerous duties I didn't quite have that in mind. I wonder if my wife would be receptive to the idea of a threesome if the third party was a Scarlett Johansson lookalike android. Perhaps I won't make the sugestion just yet......

[OTOH she might be more amenable if we also purchased the Brad Pitt conversion kit.]

[Zarathustra]

Yes - when I was considering how I might be relieved of my more onerous duties I didn't quite have that in mind. I wonder if my wife would be receptive to the idea of a threesome if the third party was a Scarlett Johansson lookalike android. Perhaps I won't make the sugestion just yet......

[OTOH she might be more amenable if we also purchased the Brad Pitt conversion kit.]