From BotJunkie:
"Honda was also at Sundance to screen a wonderful 8 minute documentary called Living With Robots, which is totally worth watching simply because of how well it sums up so many of the issues relevant to robotics today and in the near future:
Honda’s got it exactly right: the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to the future of robotics is not technical,but rather an issue of public perception. At the end of the video, Mark Rowlands says “whatever robots turn out to be, will largely be a function of us, and the decisions we make.” This is an excellent point… If we have concerns about robots, it’s important to acknowledge that those concerns generally can’t, by definition, be about the robots themselves. Rather, we must understand that robots are a reflection, or perhaps more accurately a physical embodiment, of human desire, and it’s those desires and how we act on them that need to be examined.
So if there are issues surrounding things like, oh, I don’t know, military robots, we need to recognize that military robots only exist because of human conflict. They’re not terminators, they’re not out to get us, they’re there because we made them and decided that they were important and necessary. This doesn’t answer the question of whether they’re a good idea or a bad idea, but the point is that you can’t look at robots as something separate from the human experience."
Comments
Japanese companies are so a step ahead from companies of the rest of the world...