Who's Afraid of Robots? [UPDATED]

 

Once again, from Bookforum's Omnivore blog, here is a cool collection of links on all things robotic, from killer robots to ethical robots (U.S. military!). Oh, and it seems you would probably f**k a robot, according to Gawker. I don't know, it would at least have to buy me dinner and get me drunk....

UPDATE: This morning Aeon Magazine posted an interesting and highly related article on its site, "Sexbot slaves: Thanks to new technology, sex toys are becoming tools for connection - but will sexbots reverse that trend?" by Leah Reich. Here is a little of the article:

‘Right now, we’re at an inflection point on the meaning of sexbot,’ says Kyle Machulis, the California-based world expert on sex technology. ‘Tracing the history of the term will lead you to a fork: robots for sex (idealised version: Jude Law in the movie AI), and people that fetishise being robots (clockworks, etc). There was a crossover of these in the days of alt.sex.fetish.robots, but I see less and less people fetishising the media/aesthetics, and more talking about actually having sex with robots.’

Strange times we live in, eh?

Who's afraid of robots?

Jun 4 2014
9:00AM

• Ezio Di Nucci (Duisburg-Essen) and Filippo Santoni de Sio (TUDelft): Who’s Afraid of Robots? 
• Fear of Automation and the Ideal of Direct Control. David Gunkel (NIU): The Rights of Machines: Caring for Robotic Care Givers. 
• Cameron Hamilton (Georgia State): On the Possibility of Robots Having Emotions. 
• From the inaugural issue of Intervalla, a special section on social robots and emotion: Transcending the boundary between humans and ICTs. 
• “How do robots have sex?” sounds like the set-up line for a bad joke; using robots to model an evolutionary conundrum. 
• Would you fuck a robot? You would probably fuck a robot. 
• Something any man can be proud of: The humble sperm has inspired a new robot, the MagnetoSperm — or “bro-bot”. 
• Ryan Jacobs on how the elderly fear their future robot friends will corrupt children. 
• From the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, a collective review of the books Aristotle's Laptop: The Discovery of Our Informational Mind by Igor Aleksander and Helen Morton and Consciousness and Robot Sentience by Pentti O. Haikonen. 
• Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering Ray Kurzweil thinks so. 
• US military begins research into moral, ethical robots, to stave off Skynet-like apocalypse. 
• Who’s afraid of killer robots (and why)? 
• Cory Doctorow on why it is not possible to regulate robots: We regulate machines, from drills to defibrillators, but what distinguishes a power-drill from a robot-drill? 
• Researchers have invented insect-sized robots that can swarm together and build just about anything. 
• Evan Selinger on how the emerging “Internet of Things” is turning us into robots. 
• Forget robots — we’ll soon be fusing technology with living matter. 
• Researchers put robots in conversation, and the result is somewhere between romantic bickering and dorm-room existentialism.