First Peek at Robosapien V2

balancedi writes "According to OnRobo, the New Robosapien looks to be a lot more fun but it had better be at a $200 price tag. While still controllable via remote he now is more autonomous. He also has more range of motion, better hands, a vision color system, and a laser tracking system."

Damn, visual processing?

[PornMaster]

Mirrordot of the FA [mirrordot.org]

Sensory features include a vision color system that enables Robosapien V2 to recognize objects and skin tones; he can wave when he sees you and reach out to shake your hand.

I think that's pretty f'ing amazing.

Re:lasers!!??

[PornMaster]

Maybe he's trying to fly under the Echelon "radar". :)

Re:lasers!!??

[myowntrueself]

No, its just that spelling it USA PATRIOT act is just wrong because its got nothing to do with patriotism.

Just doing my little subversive bit for society.

Re:Robo Laws

[vitamine73]

Hum. A robot could destroy a plane in either of the following cases:

1) if it's a drone

2) if destroying said plane would cause less human suffering/deaths then not destroying it (0th law comes to mind)

Re:Robo Laws

[Mant]

Wow, I'm impressed. It isn't like Asimov or any of the other writers working in his universe ever thought of first law conflicts and people lying to and manipulating robots, or robots faced with a conflict making bad choices based on faulty information. It isn't like whole stories are based on it.

The point of the law in the setting is to try to get the robot to make the 'right' choice. Humans, and later robots themselves, spend a lot of time thinking about how they should make that choice when faced with a conflict.

What would the robot do? Well the early, more privative ones would probably seize up on the spot as it couldn't find a way out and the same features that stop it breaking a law would basically turns it's brain into scrap (doesn't sound like a great design to me, but these are stories and it's dramatic.

More sophisticated robots would do what humans do, they would weight up the evidence (they don't believe something just because a human says it is true) and try whatever action they thought would minimise harm done, however they were programmed to rate 'harm'. They might or might not seize up or have problems afterwards depending on how much conflict they experienced.

Off topic and over-long, but I wanted to point out the first law is neither screwed up or pointless.