When I first saw this thread I started thinking about then SNL Robot commercial: Saturday Night Live - Old Glory Insurance - Video - NBC.com Then I remembered the Austrailian man who was shot to death by a robot (Yes it's Faux, but it's so Foxxen Funny) Australian Man Gunned Down in Driveway by Killer Robot - FOXNews.com I don't think I need robots roaming around my apartment, the maid from the Jetsons used to freak me out and probably traumatized me a bit as a kid.
I'm more concerned about "loose lips" with these bots: People of Massachusetts to be Having Sex With Robots by 2012 - University of Maastricht - Gizmodo
There's stuff that's even more disturbing... there is a growing trend for some self absorbed people to "life blog" where they basically record what they do all day and put it up on the web. So Microsofts tech department in Europe came up with this gizmo for Alzheimers patients (so they say) that is a pendant with low res camera that takes a gazillion pictures. The though it that then the patient (or the cop that finds them wandering in the middle of the street) can review what's on them to help them with the stuff they forgot. So some "life blogger" gets tech like this to record ad nauseum what they're up to, next thing you know we're getting live feeds of them missing the bowl when they pee! Now, I was listening to this guy who was talking about all this digital crap that is filling up hard drives. And he mentioned something that would be a good idea. An experiation date on things like digital photos, where they go poof! So now you could take photos of beer-bonging as a freshman, and have them all go away from the digital world by the time you need to apply for a job! But the original post is just another example of how more and more of this crap (whether a remote control web cam, or all the security cameras everywhere) are encroaching more and more on what used to be private and secure areas. A lot of this is volentary. And it gets messy. A company in Spain wanted to do "auto insurance" on the fly. So you put a gizmo in your car, and pay for your insurance based on driving load, location etc. Now the spanish gov wants all the data so they can see who was speeding! Hmmmm.... Matt
Interesting stuff there. Life bloggers? Those who would read about what someone else does with their life on a 24 hour basis, or for hours a day, have less of a life than those who set up such blogs to begin with. This is why I don't have a facebook or myspace page. I do like the idea of a digital expiration date, but someone might figure out how to cancel it and keep your image.
It's really amazing and the thing is, I think we actually might need these machines in order to continue to function in some ways. These days we're so bombarded with information and required more and more to be able to access it that some of it makes since (life blogging is an extreme application of necessary technology). In the 1800s the average person, assuming they could read, was exposed to what today would be less than a gigabyte of information in the form of music and text. These days it's not uncommon for a person to carry 8 times that amount around in their pocket (30 times that in music alone if they have an MP3 player on them) and to see several hundred pages of information a day, obviously we aren't processing all this, but often times we're still accountable for knowing it. We've moved from being agricultural, to industrial, to service based and soon I think we'll move into a data based economy where machines do the services and the primary occupation of humans is to just process data, we'll only have to sit around and think. It would probably be as simple as just saving the computer to your own hard-drive. Like the "Way back Machine", once something's online, it's basically there forever and open to the public. Just for fun.