 |
| From: rlect.com |
"A human girl can cheat on you or betray you sometimes, but these dolls never do those things. They belong to me 100 percent [...] Sometimes it takes too much time before I can have sex with the person I meet. But with these dolls, it's just a matter of a click of the mouse. With one click, they are delivered to you." [...]
— First International Guide
"[...] Robotics has also been a traditionally male-dominated clubhouse. But in the past two decades, a shift toward 'socially aware machines' (social robotics) has drawn women to the field. As technology has enabled more sophisticated programmed behaviors, machines have evolved to interact with us by communicating through spoken words, gestures, and other social cues.
These robots blend hard-core computer science with an understanding of psychology and social science—fields that have generally appealed more to women. It’s therefore not surprising that many of the leaders in this field, like Cynthia Breazeal, Andrea Thomaz, and Jodi Forlizzi, are women. In this specialty, being able to empathize and express emotion is just as important as knowing mechanics and computer programming, and like the LilyPad, these female-centric skill sets have opened the door for women to succeed in an area where they were previously underrepresented.
My very first project at Smart Design happened to be for a company called Neato Robotics, a client that understood the importance of building an emotional connection between people and products. With many groundbreaking features that would be new to consumers, the team focused on how it could best communicate what the product was doing in human terms by using words, iconography, and even facial expressions. Though the Simon project was driven by academic research, I have been able to draw a great deal of learning from the field of social robotics and apply it to products that we use in our everyday lives by thinking about ways that products can have expressive behaviors and then building an abstracted version of those animated responses into the design."
— Carla Diana, FastCompany
Read more...
"[...] Foxconn's move highlights an increasing trend toward automation among Chinese companies as labor issues such as high-profile strikes and workers' suicides plague firms in sectors from autos to technology.
Contract manufacturers such as Foxconn, which also counts Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia among its clients, are moving parts of their manufacturing to inland Chinese cities or other emerging markets.
They are also boosting research and development investments to lift their thin margins.
'Workers' wages are increasing so quickly that some companies can't take it longer,' said Dan Bin, a fund manager at Shenzhen-based Eastern Bay Investment Management, which invests in technology and consumer-related shares in China and Hong Kong. 'Automation is a general trend in many sectors in China, such as electronics. Of course some companies will consider moving their manufacturing overseas, but it's easier said than done when the supply chain is here.'
The China Business News on Monday quoted Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou as saying the company planned to use 1 million robots within three years, up from about 10,000 robots in use now and an expected 300,000 next year."
— Lee Chyen Yee and Clare Jim, Reuters
Read more...
"[..] Artificial intelligence researcher David Levy at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands recently completed (Oct 12, 2007) his Ph.D. work on the subject of human-robot relationships. His work reminds me of The Caves of Steel, from Asimov, where Elijah Baley, the human detective, and R. Daneel Olivaw his number 2 robot detective, preludes in 1954 the story of an human-robot relationship bearing a great likelihood to what Levy to day proposes: In his thesis, Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners, [he] conjectures that robots will become so human-like in appearance, function and personality that many people will fall in love with them, have sex with them and even marry them [...] 'It may sound a little weird, but it isn’t,' Levy said. 'Love and sex with robots are inevitable.'
Dr. Levy argues that psychologists have identified roughly a dozen basic reasons why people fall in love, 'and almost all of them could apply to human-robot relationships. For instance, one thing that prompts people to fall in love are similarities in personality and knowledge, and all of this is programmable. Another reason people are more likely to fall in love is if they know the other person likes them, and that’s programmable too.' "
— First International Guide
Read more...
See a related article here...
No comments:
Post a Comment