Why do we need an unmanned stealth plane that can fire missiles from one continent to another? Why should said plane cost 143million pounds ($216,081,609 USD)? Why should said plane look like something strait out of Battlestar Galactica.
Well aside from it being unbelievably cool to be able to shoot stuff a continent away there isn’t. In fact, you guessed it, this 143 million pound plane is programmed to destroy us.
Named for the Celtic god of thunder the Taranis is the ultimate tool in raining hellfire from above. If by above I mean a continent away, and hellfire I mean a long range missile. And the British are giving this thing autonomous artificial intelligence.
The Taranis will be virtually impossible to spot on radar and is designed to fly at high altitude making it extremely hard to track down. Or more importantly hard to shoot out of the sky. It will be fully capable of defending itself against other aircraft and will have the weapons to strike targets from long distances. It really is the perfect weapon. Its fast, hard to fight, effective, and most importantly it doesn’t have a heart. Sure it is in some way controlled by an operator via satellite but they are still giving it somewhat of an autonomous artificial intelligence. Its much easier to let the other guy pull the trigger on a missile targeting a city a continent way. It’s a hell of a lot easier if the other guy is a robot.
The future of air combat seems to be unmanned. And as it is now we seem to be in a pissing contest for who has the best UAV. (Even though it too is programmed to destroy us I am a fan of the Predator Drone for no other reason than it has an epically cool name.) My question is why.
The reality is that the real way this is programmed to destroy us is not via long range missile (that helps though) it is the pocket book. We are in a global wide recession yet they are spending $216 million dollars on ONE plane. Of course that can be considered chump change when we talk about planes. The stealth bomber costs $2.1 billion dollars. Its why America only has 21 of them. The US equivalent to the Taranis is the Predator C  (or the General Atomics Avenger) costs only $15 million and the standard MQ-9 Reaper costs $10.5 million. So the Taranis seems a little pricey in today’s economy. After all its engine is being developed by Rolls Royce. Maybe Brittan just wants to do things a bit classier than us Yankees.
This is a useless expenditure. The only use that I can see is the autonomous system kicking in and blowing up a target a continent away while a solder looks at a screen flashing “KILL ALL HUMANS”. But I guess getting blown up by an insane robot turning against its human oppressors from a continent away is the coolest way to get killed by a robot. Its only a matter of time.
So thanks a lot Brittan! Clearly no one in England has seen the movie Stealth. I can’t say that I blame you it was a terrible movie but look it up next time you want to build a 143million pound death machine. Your tax dollars just killed off the human race.

“I now pronounce you 01101101 01100001 01101110 and 01110111 01101001 01100110 01100101 00001101 00001010 ” It just doesn’t have a good ring to it. Yet leave it to the crazy robotics specialists of Japan to once again raise the robot bar. This time being married by a Robot. This is once again an ominous warning of things to come.
There was a day when the ability to join two people in holy matrimony was a sacred honor. It could only be preformed by a select few:  Priests, rabbis, judges, ship captains, Elvis look-a-likes and people who took 15 minutes and paid 30 bucks online. These are positions of power. Positions that command authority thus having the authority over those they will marry. So why are robots doing this in Japan?
On May 15th 2010 Stoko Unoue married her client Tomohiro Shibata using a robot her company makes called the I-Fairy. The I-Fairy’s intended design is to greet people at museums, libraries and other public places. They specially programmed it to program preform the marriage and presto! holy matrimony.
This issue that this does bring up is not that these two will regret this in 10 years or that robots wearing flowers is creepy. The issue is that this robot was given a position of authority. First they marry us than they use that authority to destroy us. And even worse is that they will destroy us while wearing flowers.

It has been a long time sense I have had a beef with Virginia. In fact I haven’t had a problem with them for  a hundred years or so. So I was shocked to hear that once again Virginia is out to destroy us. This time with Robots!

According to www.robotworldnews.com Virginia Tech students have developed a new humanoid robot named CHARLI. (“Cognitive  Humanoid Antonymous Robot with Learning Intelligence”. This Proves that nerds can string together enough polysyllabic words to make an acronym that works.) And CHARLI can walk.   Poorly.

I know what you are thinking “Jake, he takes ridiculously small steps and I could probably just kick him over.” Good point! However this is just the first step (pun not intended) towards an Evil Versatile Intelligent Life form or as I like to call him EVIL (Take that nerds!)

But I digress. So it can walk in small steps. Big deal! It is a big deal because it’s the first robot built in America to do so without having to be tethered by cords in order to be controlled. He can walk, move his arms and head simply by remote control. As Jeakweon Han. Dennis Hong (J.K. to his friends) said, “Its one small step for a robot, one giant leap for robotics.” DAMN YOU NEIL ARMSTRONG WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP QUOTING YOU WHILE MAKING LAME JOKES?!

So you didn’t just hear it from me, J.K. agrees that sooner or later they will be moving quickly on their own. Moving quickly to run you down and put you in an internment camp.

As always, fear the uprising and down with robots.

Virginia Tech's walking robot in very very slow action

Honda has released something more lame than the Segway. The Honda U3-X is a gyroscope powered, one man, unicycle. Segway with a seat. While this poses little threat to humanity in the ongoing battle between robots and humans it is quite lame. One could make the argument that with tools like this we will become even lazier and thus less able to defend ourselves when the robot revolution comes but more than anything its just lame.
The 6 km/hour unicycle will work the same way as the Segway leaning forward and backward in order to move. Powering mall cops with great ease.
Still I have to ask why. Why do we need  this? Sure it adds more comfort to our daily lives. Sure it only ways 22 lbs yet can carry a person weighing as much as 220 lbs but why can’t people just walk? We should be grateful to have the ability to move our own two feet. Man did not evolve millions of years in order to walk upright only to sit down on a unicycle that moves for us.

NASA and GM are teaming up to bring us the Robonaut2. It is a robot designed to help man both in space and on earth. Helping us build space stations and station wagons. Slaves to humans on two fronts.

Is this the future of Detroit? GM’s director of global research and developments, Alan Taub, states, “For GM this is about safer cars and safer plants.” The idea seems to be Robonaut2 and humans working side by side to solve problems and build more advanced safer cars.
However there are two things that the past has taught us.
The first being that humans end up using advanced tools to work for them not with them. If you have have a robot that can screw in a lug nut just as well as a human why make the human do the work? Its the Laziness of man that gives these robots power. Just as the robotic check out lines become more and more prevalent in our grocery stores. Why employ four people in a store when you can employ one to oversee four robotic checkstands simultaneously? What this means is building more robots than were originally thought necessary. Turning some of the abandoned Detroit car factories into robot factories. Is this going to make us one step closer to the singularity?
The second thing that society has taught us is that robots are not to be trusted.
Do Amarica a favor. Buy foreign.

The Advanced Robotic System Laboratories (ARSL for Short) is currently developing a robot they call PROTO. PROTO is a state of the art robot who’s goal is to develop a system to make communication between robots and humans more “natural” .

PROTO has movable eyes, eyebrows, mouth, hands etc… all of which are designed to make him more natural and easier to communicate with.  I say all of these things just make him more freaky looking. Why make a robot look like a human? Why worry that we arn’t going to be able to communicate with a robot because it doesn’t have eyebrows? Its a robot. Just as we should not perscribe human emotions or feelings onto animals we should not build them into an artificial creature. First step: PROTO. Second step: T-800.
Thank god that for now he has to be hardlined into a computer in order to work. However ARSL does say that they PROTO will aid in the “development of a fully self-contained humanoid robot platform”. Will it be self contained to make it better equipped to try and find Sarah Connor? Thank god that they have the sense to keep this thing in chains

The ChemBot is a new jelly like robot being developed by DARPA and the US Army. Although still a prototype, this robot is a vision of what the future of robotics could hold. This jelly like robot can change it’s shape and squeeze through holes and cracks to reach it’s goal.

Source CNET News

What is the percentage that Artificial Intelligence will evolve to the point that Robots will be able to reproduce? A “10 percent chance … within 25 years and a 90 percent chance of it occurring within 75 years“ according to David McAllester, a professor and chief academic officer at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. This turning point is referred to as the “the Singularity” and once reached, would be the last moment robots would need humans for their own survival.

Source Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Tomotaka Takahashi, of ROBO-GARAGE, has released preliminary glimpses of his newest addition to the robot family – the ROPID.

Source Plastic Pals

This 14″ tall child-like robot can not only speak and gesture, but can quickly run and maneuver. Doesn’t this scream ‘bad idea’ to anyone else. A small adorable humanoid figure that can trick you into thinking it’s child like and innocent. It also possesses the ability to quickly turn, run and wants nothing more than to stab you with sharp objects. Sounds familiar right – that’s because we’re just recreating the events in Child’s Play and will have hordes of psychopathic robotic death dolls harvesting our organs for food.

Researchers think that it’s a good idea to build a fleet of autonomous Space Robots to Explore Mars with “squadrons of wheeled rovers and floating robot boats” that would scour Mar’s surface for scientific evidence of water and other incites into Mar’s environment. That sounds like a good idea until the robot’s get fed up with taking orders from Earth, develop their own destructive agenda and turn on their previous masters.

Source Discover