I’ve recently read of a couple of stupid encounters with robots in one form or another.
For example, former Deadspin contributor Joe MacLeod wrote about his encounter with robots in his “remote interview” with canned recorded faces asking generic questions, and presumably his answers would be forwarded to some kind of HR software of some kind.
The beer blog Shut Up About Barclay Perkins had this description of robots which were supposed to help clean tables at an airport lounge:
A new feature of the lounge are creepy dustbins that creep up to your table and demand your plates and cutlery. But when you try to dump stuff on it, it swerves away at the last minute. Now that’s not going to piss people off.
I’ve encountered wandering robots once or twice in a grocery store which… I don’t know… were supposed to sweep up? Keep an eye on potential shoplifters? Electrocute people snitching grapes?
Have you had encounters with robots in one form or another in hardware or software form? Robocalls of supposed surveys asking if you supported more funding for police? Robot vacuum cleaners? Videos of creepy robot dogs?
Got any favorite robots in fiction, ranging from Maschinenmensch from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Dr. Smith’s antagonist in Lost in Space to poor Marvin the paranoid android?
And for another example of robots gone wrong, here’s an interactive Jerry Jones to be installed at the Cowboys stadium.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/lists/jerry-jones-ai-cowboys-att-stadium-video-fan-reaction
My grocery store has one of those huge floor sweeping robots, but the programming is terrible. If there is a smudge on the floor it will interpret it as an object and will stay in place while highjacking the PA system to tell everyone that a cleanup is needed. I’m in the store maybe 30 minutes at a time and that thing freaks out at least twice in that time period. So I’m sure it makes the employees crazy hearing it all day long.
My employer has a robot dressed up like a train engine which delivers meals to patients on inpatient floors. It moves so slowly that I’m amazed the kids don’t get food poisoning because the food has to be lukewarm by the time it gets where it’s going.
I joined the robot vacuum revolution a couple of years ago. Ordered a Roomba, that I could program, and pilot from my phone, and all kinds of cool shit. Once it arrived, it informed me that it couldn’t run on my 5G network. I needed to use some Fred Flintstone 2.4G shit or something, like a damn Neanderthal. Seriously, what the actual fuck?
I sent it back and got a Shark. It runs on my network, but it just bumbles around the house randomly. Eventually, it picks up all the crap. I’m like, fine. I didn’t want to pilot a vacuum around the house anyway. Screw you, Roomba!
Now I want a lawnmower I can pilot around my yard. I know, they make them. I just haven’t bought one yet. Because they probably run on a fucking Fred Flintstone network.
I read a horror story once about a dog that pooped in the house and a Roomba that ran over it and spread it over inch of the floor.
“It’s a living…”
-Roomba
It’s one thing to have a robot with a broom. It’s an entirely different thing when you have a robot with spinning blades.
My daughter had this robot toy when she was a kid. She and her best friend used to shoot the nerf missiles at our poor dog. I had to take the darts away and they weren’t interested in the robot anymore. The moral of this story is that robots and their uses are evil!
That looks like an updated version of Omnibot.
I used to consider myself a fictitious robot but now I have taken too many strides toward being proud that I no longer am to be as proud of the one I was.
Just josh’n…
I’m proud of both.
It would suck being constrained by Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics though
I see what you did there.
Has anyone else read ÄŒapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)?
Technically, they were a bit more Android, than what *we* would call Robots, 100-odd years later–but R.U.R. is where the word “Robot”came fromđŸ˜‰
I last read it 20-ish years ago, but I remember thinking it would definitely be a fun play to see, if I ever had the chance–just like The Insect Play would be a neat one!
I read it a long time ago and don’t remember much except like you say they weren’t very robot-y.
Capek’s Apocryphal Tales is wonderful.
I have a Robot Saga at work right now. Seems the idiots were concerned about material going from a non GMP area to a GMP area for some reason so they decided to use a material handling robot (automated forklift) to deliver to material to our production rooms instead of using warehouse material handling techs.
It took several years to get it going. Then they had to polish the floor because the lidar beam couldn’t detect stuff if the floor isn’t polished. I brought up the safety factor as the charging plates are on the floor… they claimed they wouldn’t cause a short if the floor got wet (floods sometimes happen because door seals fail). On top of that the process is about 80% slower than the old way.
The last thing is that we have to pull the Non GMP skids from the room to the corridor because the lidar can’t handle extra skids piled on top of each other because the lidar goes crazy.
So we’re defeating the original purpose of the robot.
A waste of several million dollars.
my favourite robot ive actually worked with so far was bessy the wondercow…..the ancient welding robot…was a lot of fun fixing that old girl …..constantly….lol
kinda miss her
anyways….far as fiction goes….i kinda have a soft spot for erasmus
‘i threw a baby off a balcony once….. the concequences were severe’
that erasmus
and coz its tuesday
incidentally till death do us part turns in to till the shit kills us in dutch if you switch the death and part