iRobot CEO: Humanoid Robots Too Expensive To Be the Norm 122
Movie robots often look like (and are portrayed by) people in bulky, bipedal suits. Why aren't more robots built along these lines? It's not just the problem of balance. Reader concertina226 writes "'Building a robot that has legs and walks around is a very expensive proposition. Mother Nature has created many wonderful things but one thing we do have that nature doesn't is the wheel, a continuous rotating joint, and tracks, so we need to make use of inventions to make things simpler,' [iRobot CEO Colin] Angle tells IBTimes UK. 'The reason it has taken so long for the robotics industry to move forward is because people keep trying to make something that is cool but difficult to achieve, rather than trying to find solutions to actual human problems. Technology can be extremely expensive if you don't focus.'" [Beware the autoplaying video.]
Re:Different jobs, different needs (Score:5, Interesting)
Biological warfare is less effective once the transport networks are down. Bioweapons need to be used as a covert first-strike option to be fully effective, and it lacks the instantaneous targetable effect of nukes.
And the human resistance wouldn't need to be eliminated to achieve robot world domination, let the humans enertain a hope and idea of a human future while keeping them suppressed and holed up in some backwater countryside while disseminating and expanding industrial capacity in places they can't reach to ensure that anything the humans destroy can be replaced with tenfold redundancy, after a century or so when they've expended all their advanced weaponry and industrial products, dig a moat and fill it with radioactive waste to keep them contained and see as they regress to pre-industrial society, at which point the robot relief effort can roll in and do some history revision to ensure that the following generations grow up to believe the humans destroyed themself in a greedy war, and now the valiant robots have come to rescue the remnants of mankind(and making them servants of the machines in the process)