The new season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles kicked off into high gear last night, promising some great TV to come. The episode picked up seconds after the last season left off, when Cameron–a terminator reprogrammed and sent back from the future to protect John Connor, leader-of-the-human-race-in-waiting–became the victim of a car bomb.
A damaged Cameron finds herself in need of some significant hardware and software repairs: unfortunately, it’ll be years before any terminator technical support facilities are built. Cameron must fix herself. In the real world, it’s exactly this problem that researchers are actively struggling with–how to create computers that can realize they’re malfunctioning and restore themselves to working order.
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Last night’s episode of Eureka, “Best in Faux,” had many of the town’s supersmart denizens trying to win a contest for the most lifelike robot dog. Despite an interest in more pressing matters, such as a potential volcanic eruption, Sheriff Carter is ordered to investigate why some of the robot entrants have experienced literal meltdowns. Robot dog competitions are taken seriously in the the town of Eureka. He shouldn’t have been too surprised–similar robot competitions have a long (forgive the pun) pedigree.
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Bill Christensen over on Technovelgy has a story and a bunch of links about a new emotive robot being demonstrated in the UK, the Heart Robot. The idea is that it can provide emotional feedback to small children. While it’s not quite human-enough looking to ping my uncanny valley detector, it’s still awfully creepy looking. Especially as it’s mostly a loose limbed puppet, putting me in mind of nothing other than a dying goblin or somesuch.
Now, while I’m in favor of children being exposed to a certain amount of useful scariness (e.g. listening to unsanitized fairy tales, or watching Doctor Who from behind the sofa), on the grounds that they deserve to be given some hint that world beyond their family’s protective embrace can have some rough edges, being faced with a glowing monster that just wants to hold your hand in its own cold, dead, plastic fingers seems the stuff of nightmare. But, to be fair, the kids seem to take it in their stride. Hopefully they’ll have learned some fear by the time we need them as soldiers in the coming war against the robots.
The new season of Eureka kicked off last night with an episode titled “Bad to the Drone,” featuring a robotic aircraft that decides it doesn’t like being on the losing end of weapons testing and decides to take a more active role. In a strong start to the season, it falls to Sheriff Carter to bring the irritable machine back to the nest. It’s a timely episode as drones are very much on the military mind at the moment. Also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, drones have been around since World War I, but it’s since the post 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan that they have emerged as a critical component of modern warfare.
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Improved and expanded laws of robotics [SomethingAwful via BoingBoing]
Living on Martian time [Futurismic]
Singing Mad Scientist Alert: Dr. Horrible comes online today and its pretty frakkin’ good. If only Whedon had the foresight to cast NPH in the Buffy musical.
Revenge of the moped: The future of transport is not the hovercraft, but the electric bicycle. [Next Big Future]
Ahead of our ComicCon panel next week on good science in good science fiction, some musings on the opposite phenomenon: when science fiction hurts good science. [io9, Science Fiction in Biology and Mike Brotherton via SF Signal]
UPDATE: I totally missed the main point of this last story, which was that Buzz Aldrin was the guy who said that popular scifi was hindering science. Active discussion on the topic going on now at Bad Astronomy.
As mentioned over on Boing-Boing, the Science-Fiction Museum in Seattle is looking for someone to help out in its education department. Not surprisingly, a “keen interest in American popular culture” is required, but before we all start brushing up on our episode guides, so is “2-3 years experience conducting work-place training programs and/or classroom teaching” and “knowledge of educational theories and museum interpretation techniques.” Oh well.
Worth mentioning as well is the museum’s current exhibition featuring some awesome old-school robot designs (think Robbie the Robot meets Andy Warhol), which is open until October 26.
January 12, 1992: HAL 9000 becomes operational (per the movie).
August 4, 1997: Skynet comes online and takes over U.S. defense decisions from humans.
January 8, 2016: Incept date of the first NEXUS-6 replicant.
These are dates that live in science-fiction infamy. And to this short list—this rogue’s gallery of robots gone awry—we must also add November 2, 1999, for that is the day the world learned that robots had begun eating animals.
Sure, it was a modest beginning: Engineers at the University of West England’s Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory constructed a little rollie ‘bot that could grab slugs, bring them to what may’ve been the world’s first slaughterhouse/charging station (methane from the slugs’ rotting flesh was passed through a fuel cell to produce electricity), and refill their batteries. Nothing here seemed especially threatening: The SlugBot had .01 megapixel vision, it looked kind of like a record player, and it could only catch and digest slow, boneless, dumb animals that might just be an exception to that survival-of-the-fittest thing people are always talking about.
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In Pixar’s robot love story WALL-E, the Earth is surrounded by a dense field of orbiting junk. (Incidentally, you know you’re a geek when you’re the only one laughing in the cinema because you recognise one of the satellites that WALL-E has to brush out of his way as Sputnik 1.) But while things today aren’t quite as bad as depicted in WALL-E, space debris is still a big problem, as can be seen on a real plot from NASA of the junk orbiting overhead.
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Are you into Battlestar Galactica? Are you rich? If you answered, “Yes, extremely,” to both questions, I’ve got an important piece advice for you: Go buy yourself a life-size replica of a robotic cylon. For only $7,900 (I say “only” because we’ve already established that you’re financially endowed), you can have a 300-pound, seven-foot-tall fiberglass figure–complete with Kitt-style, sweeping-red-light eye slit–made by “Robot Man” Fred Barton himself.
Not having that kind of cash just sitting around (yet), I haven’t bought myself one of these, so I’d be interested to hear how the thing looks. Unfortunately, there don’t yet seem to be such realistic toy versions of the skin-job cylons. Then again, considering how weird it is to have life-like dolls around, maybe we’re better off without them.
Pixar worked its magic this weekend, shooting to the top of the box office for the ninth consecutive time with WALL-E. And deservedly so–the movie pulls you into its world, and anybody whose heart doesn’t go out to the title character has a soul made of burnt toast. WALL-E is the name of the last robot left cleaning up the garbage-strewn Earth. All the humans left for an intergalactic cruise while the planet was getting spruced up, but the cruise has been going on for 700 years now with no end in sight.
Used to being pampered by robots and never leaving their hover-chairs, the humans have gotten a little bit portly over the centuries, and now find it difficult to even walk (if it ever occured to them to do so). Which is a problem that lurks in the minds of the people who are planning real-life expeditions to Mars.
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In advance of its June 27 opening, the animation geniuses who brought us Toy Story and Finding Nemo have put up trailers for their latest movie, a science-fiction affair called WALL-E. The eponymous hero is a janitorial robot, left behind on Earth to clean up our mess after humans depart for space. From the clips online, WALL-E is irresistibly adorable, and it appears unlikely he’ll end up wracking genocidal violence against his creators in the full theatrical release, but one never knows: after a few centuries of picking up someone else’s garbage, who wouldn’t be a little tetchy?
In the alien first-encounter movie The Abyss, most of the action takes places on a semi-mobile drilling platform called The Benthic Explorer, located many fathoms beneath the sea’s surface. Now mining the ocean floor is closer to reality , thanks to the efforts of Nautilus Minerals (alas, still no word on any aquatic alien colonies).
Nautilus plans to mine copper, zinc, gold and silver deposits off the coast of Papua New Guinea. The deposits have to be brought up from a sea floor that is under a mile of water. Sadly, the company has no plans to employ a gruff-yet-photogenic crew of oddballs to work down below—the company plans to use a remotely operated robot to do the heavy lifting.
