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Friday, January 23, 2015

Soap Bubbles

After Battlestar Galactica, the most successful TV re-boot has to be Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman as The Walking Dead.

3 comments:

jimf said...

Speaking of TV, I was eating my chili con carne at the diner
last night, and CNN was on the flatscreen facing my table.

So the show (sans sound or closed captioning) was "Inside
Man" with Morgan Spurlock (not that I'd ever heard of him
before), and the episode was "Meet Our Robot Overlords?"
http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/01/21/orig-inside-man-morgan-spurlock-robots.cnn

There were appearances by Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking,
but the show seemed to focus on these Japanese animatronic
androids. **Majorly** creepy -- how can anyone take these
things seriously? (Well, then again, Martine Rothblatt has
her Bina-bot, bless her heart.)

It was all just -- ugh. It's too early in the day to
have the creeps.

jimf said...

> . . .the show seemed to focus on these Japanese animatronic
> androids. . .

Oh, and there was a thing right out of William Gibson's latest
(_The Peripheral_) -- a video screen/camera mounted on a stick
on top of a Segway-like rolling base that gives you a kind
of virtual telepresence -- you can send the thing to Paris
and talk to the natives without having to leave your
house.

And you thought Google Glass was bad. . .

Dale Carrico said...

Failing to deliver either AI or VR, Silicon Valley may manage with awkward gawky robots and avatars to deliver us all to the Uncanny Valley.