The Best Robots of 2009

kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."

Player Project

[xzvf]

Support this: http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] So we don't have to fight the closed systems like we did with the PC. Really, robotics is going through its early DIY stage, where most interesting stuff is built by hand using lots of modified parts. Anything we can do, as it moves into mainstream products, to keep the DIY rights to open the hardware and change the software if we want, helps our future freedom.

Re:Evolution (2001)

[shentino]

I'd say that germs flourish because they worry just about sustenance, whereas us humans are always fighting and warring and generally trying to succeed by making everyone else fail.

Re:Evolution (2001)

[moderatorrater]

That's retarded. Germs devour and destroy each other as much or more than humans do. The difference is that germs are cheaper and faster to reproduce. Germs can go through several generations over the course of a week, so they're able to evolve much more quickly than larger animals and fill ecological niches more quickly and more efficiently. In addition, their population can explode over a very short time period. This means that when they find a resource they can exploit, they exploit it quickly and completely.

Forget the bullshit ideal that nature is loving and humans are brutal and warlike. Wherever there's a resource shortage there's fighting, whether it's humans or animals. The only difference is that humans can moderate it more effectively and then feel bad about it afterwards.

Re:Evolution (2001)

[Anonymous Coward]

No, humans do it for resources...

Almost every single war ever fought was due to resources.

Right! It you can oppress or destroy a religious group, race, or nationality WHILE you take their shit, well that's just a bonus.

Re:Evolution (2001)

[TapeCutter]

My point was that germs (and, well, animals in general) do it for survival.

Humans do it for sheer domination.

Yes, domination of resources and territory that allow the individual and his tribe to prosper. Groups of humans work with each other to out survive other groups of humans working with each other, just like any other animal [youtube.com]. This behavioural pattern (instinct) to form competing tribes is found everywhere in nature from bacterial colonies to moon landings. The instinct "just is", it is neither good nor evil as it's responsible for bullets from an enemy, bandages from a friend and, no condoms from the pope's tribe.

IMHO the most remarkable thing about modern homo-sapiens is that an individual can belong to multiple tribes simultaneously. To my mind this very recent evolutional trait is what makes us unique.