For Eve’s creation story we go not to The Book of Genesis, but rather Fortune. They talked with Wall-E’s director about consulting with Apple to put the future in futuristic design:
“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.”
The Stupid Robot Contest is an annual show held by Meiwa Electronics to determine whose robot is the silliest…Some of the other contestants last year were a chorus of pregnant wife robots, a child robot that did push-ups, and and a “moe” robot dressed like a maid from a maid cafe.
This article by Hiroko Tabuchi is a quick wrap-up of the state of robotics in Japan today, where “humans and intelligent robots routinely live side-by-side and interact socially.”
Along with info on current experiments, statistics (over 370,000 robots worked at factories across Japan in 2005) and history, there touch on the difference in cultural portrayal robots have had in Japan compared to the United States:
Robots have long been portrayed as friendly helpers in Japanese popular culture, a far cry from the often rebellious and violent machines that often inhabit Western science fiction.
While Japan had Astro Boy in 1963, in the US we had homicidal giant robots tearing up movie screens at drive-ins across the country. So you can see why we might not want them poking in our mouths with pointy instruments just yet.
Has your robot been lazing around the house instead of earning its keep? Robot Central has a summary of iRobot’s Colin Angle’s presentation at RoboBusiness. It basically reads like a robot classifieds section of the future, and is a good starting point if you need ideas for your next build.
Hello, I am still catching up from vacation. Here’s a trio of robot links all via the Boing:
