Asimov’s Three Laws

Just to refresh the concept, Dr. Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics aren’t real laws. They are a literary plot device. Dr. Asimov knew that there were work arounds for them. He always found reasons to work around the three laws in his robot stories. What you WILL find to be true is this:

1.Robots are machines. Machines, like humans, age and break down if not properly maintained. A faulty machine will injure or kill the first person that is careless.

2. Any military that uses robots on a field of battle will have some type designed for defensive/offensive combat. If you don’t want to be killed by a military robot, stay out of it’s line of fire.

3. Hobby robots made out of sturdy plastic will bite your fingers just as hard, if not harder, as metal when you grab them in the middle of program execution.

In the recent movie Astroboy, the robots mention in passing about Asimov’s three laws. “You know, a robot may not injure a human, yada yada yada.” The laws have no effect on these guys. And if you think they should, you need to stay away from your blender. You might like the number of fingers on your hands.

Micropayments

Here is my reply to an article on the New York Times website about micropayment models. By the time you read it here, it should have cleared the sensors on their site.

-”In retrospect, most newspapers had a micropayment system in place decades ago, and never realized it: The corner newspaper box. John Q. Public stood at the bus stop and read the headlines through the cloudy plastic window. (free content). If there was a story that really interested him, he put his coins in the slot, and bought the paper. (micropayment. The cost of a single paper amounts to pennies per story.) Redistribution of paid content also existed then. (some jackass paid his coins, then took ALL the papers in the box and gave them to his friends.) Of course subscriptions are self explanitory.

Advertising models aside, micropayments are the way to go, folks. Give me a headline with a single paragraph. If the story is compelling, I’ll click to buy it. I think I can afford a penny or two.”

Immersive AR comes a step closer.

Wrap™ 310

The link is to a pair of AR glasses. Still mostly meant for video viewing, but these don’t look nearly as geeky. So we’re getting there.

Smart parking meters

‘Smart’ parking meters catching on across U.S.

I heard Leo Laporte talk about this concept on his Tech Guy radio show podcast a week or so ago. Cool idea. Time for me to pester Coca Cola about smart soda machines in a new blog post again.

Coke bot

Abra a Felicidade Coca-Cola

The link is of a robot serving up dessert and a Coke. Okay, I’m kind of pissed. A couple of years ago I blogged about Coca Cola being able to put out robotic drink machines that at least interacted with you. Have they listened to me? NOOOOooooo…. So today I find the above link via www.botjunkie.com . Yeah, it’s a commercial in Brazil. So if they can sponsor robotics in Brazil, why can’t they put out a robotic Coke machine on the city streets of America? Hmm? You know they know the tech exists.

Hey, Atlanta, are ya listening? Helloooooo…….

Missikins crossed the “Rainbow Bridge”

Our oldest cat at 18 years passed on Sunday night, somewhere between 9 pm and 2:30 am. While this is not a huge new story for many of you, this blog post is kind of therapy for me.

The Rainbow Bridge is something that I had forgotten about until my wife mentioned it on that Saturday. Up until then, I was totally prepared for the cat’s passing. She had been steadily losing weight for months. And before that, she had a steady intake of water. So we had figured at first that she had a tapeworm. Nope. No evidence of worms in her litterbox. So our next natural assumption was either her kidneys were shutting down, or she developed leukemia. this last weekend, she was wobbling very badly, could barely stand up, and never ate.

We buired her yesterday morning. She was a great cat. A stray kitten. The irony is, I first told my wife “Don’t pick it up, don’t pet it, don’t even look at it. It will go away.” We already had a 15 year old cat, GiGi, suffering from kidney desease. The very next day, Missy was picked up… By me. I’m so weak.

RIP, Missy. We love you and miss you.

C/Fe

C/Fe. The periodic table of elements codes for Carbon, and Iron. Isaac Asimov first used the combination in his book *The Caves of Steel*:

“See fee? What’s that?”

“Just the chemical symbols for the elements carbon and iron, Elijah. Carbon is the basis of human life and iron of robot life. It becomes easy to speak of C/Fe when you wish to express a culture that combines the best of the two on an equal but parallel basis.”

“See fee. Do you write it with a hyphen? Or how?”

“No, Elijah. A diagonal line between the two is the accepted way. It symbolizes neither one nor the other, but a mixture of the two, without priority.”

The concept is humans and robots working side by side. An old friend of mine back in 1977 coined the phrase “men and machines working together”. As far as I know, he never read *The Caves of Steel*.

I would have loved to know Isaac Asimov personally. I could have talked robots with him for hours, I think.

Blog import

Hi, everyone. I was able to import my 360 blogs from Yahoo, and post them here at WordPress. So I guess I’ll be using WordPress after all Which is a good thing. It beats blogging at Angelfire!

Look out for the crash.

Technology is moving too fast for me to keep up with. Suddenly everyone has to be in touch with each other. Everybody wants instant gratification. If I were to maintain the same amount of information intake today as I did when I got my first Commodore C64, my brain would fry.

I’ve never been much of a social person. And yet I have accounts with Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and YouTube and I can’t remember all the other services. I have photo site accounts with Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa, and Windows Live. Of course I screwed up my Flickr account. And use Photobucket for housing a few avatar images that don’t host on some chat sites. In self defense I hardly ever use MySpace and Twitter. Or my cell phone for that matter. And yet I need my daily Internet fix, or I suffer withdrawls. I think maybe my blog here has been read by a handful of people. About the same follow me on Facebook. Even less than that comment on my posts around the web.

What would we do if we scaled back on all this interconnectedness? I seriously think an entire generation would be totally lost. Maybe Ray Kurtzweil is right. Humanity is on a collision course of merging with it’s machines. With it’s tech. I don’t claim to want to become a Luddite. I’ve been enthusiastic about all the cool stuff happening. But I’m not sure if I’m ready to go the way of the cyborg. I’ve still got all my appendages. The closest thing to augmentation for me is prescription eyeglasses. And I was wearing those since I was seven.

I don’t want to live forever. So look at it this way. About the time America taps the last of it’s social security funds for us baby boomers, the gen X’ers will have all merged into it’s electronic shells. Machines don’t eat, so they don’t need jobs. So they won’t need to worry about social security since they live as long as the hardware works.

I hope the electric smart grid is in place by then. You ‘borgs are gonna need a recharge!

Hello world!

Well, here I am, folks.  I’ll attempt to put a link to my old GeoCities site up in a few days after I learn the lay of the land here.  Of course you can still visit the GeoCities site until Yahoo takes it down.