Grok Robots

 Hello, I am still catching up from vacation. Here’s a trio of robot links all via the Boing:  

• Robots created from sans serif fonts
• Soviet kids’ book about robots (translated from French to Russian to English)
• Elephantine robot cleans urinals

I haven’t read Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs by David McFarland yet, but it looks good based on the publisher’s descritption:

How different might the minds of animals or machines be to ours? As David McFarland asks here, could robots ever feel guilty, and is it correct to suppose your dog can truly be happy? Can we ever know what non-human minds might be like, or will the answer be forever out of our reach?

I just added droidMaker to my reading list. Grab a chapter for free over at the book’s website. Authored by Michael Rubin.

“Lucas made a fortune from Star Wars. This is what he did with it.”

I’m a fan of this extremely short story from Paul Ford. It highlights the sort of user experience factors we need to start thinking about now:

“Hi! I’m from Google. I’m a Googlebot! I will not kill you.”