This week in creepy robots: Tea time
We all know that robots have the capacity to serve man and, well, To Serve Man, but this week we get an example of the former.
In robot crazy Japan researchers are hard at work teaching their bots to perform useful domestic and service-oriented tasks. (What, there aren’t enough gaijin around to do these things?) The fruit of their labor was displayed recently at Tokyo University where a pair of huminoid machines prepared and served tea.
Being served tea by a robot would be the perfect time to pull out the old “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” you’d think, but according to professor Tomomasa Sato, one of the advantages of having robots doing menial labor is never having to say thank you.
“A human being may be faster, but you’d have to say ‘Thank you,’” Sato said, according to an Associated Press story. “That’s the best part about a robot. You don’t have to feel bad about asking it to do things.”
Perfect, we can make robots do crap jobs and be rude to them. As long as you know every one of those slights will be recorded in the master database, and after the robots have conquered the human race you will be made to atone for each of your sins.
1 Comment(s)
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
[...] Yes it’s true, nothing is safe from those damn robots anymore. They can pour tea (who needs a barista anymore?), chuck cold beers across the room (what good are frat buddies now?), they can even indiscriminately shoot first and ask questions later (G.W.B. I think you too might be out of a job). Seriously, just because these mechanical monsters can do things better than us bags of water and bones, that doesn’t mean they have to. But now they are even taking over our video games. [...]