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In Japan, a new robot - the Pepper Robot - went on sale on Saturday (20 Jun), but the demand was a bit more than they expected:
The mobile carrier said 1,000 units of the household robot sold out in one minute on Saturday, its first day of consumer sales. The humanoid machine is designed to be a personal robot and a member of the family. It can’t do housework, but it can converse, recognize people’s emotions, develop its own “feelings” and retrieve information from the Internet such as messages and weather forecasts. SoftBank describes Pepper as the world’s first personal robot that has its own emotions.
Most of the Peppers were purchased online Saturday, but 30 units were ordered through a drawing held Friday at a SoftBank shop in Tokyo. No information about the first buyers was available, a SoftBank spokesman said.
The company plans to make more Peppers available in July.
Designed by SoftBank group company Aldebaran Robotics of France, Pepper has a raft of sensors and cloud-based artificial intelligence chops. It’s cheap compared to other robots of comparable sophistication, but it’s still a major purchase—it costs ¥198,000 (US$1,600) plus ¥24,600 in monthly data and insurance fees.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Monday June 22 2015, @06:20AM
So it's got hands and can move around...but can't do anything to manipulate the physical world? My smart phone does all the other stuff; and without that creepy, soulless, visage. Make one that can grab me a beer from the fridge and bring it to my office and we have a deal.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @06:26AM
Gee, Mavis, your house is across the street. That's an awfully long way to go for making out. I'd rather make out with my Marilyn-Monroe-bot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @11:49AM
You got modded funny, because that was funny, but something serious to think about is I predict a sociological taboo will be created.
By analogy, when I was a teen about 90% of the time my sister was about 1000x physically nearer to me than my girlfriend so logically as per above claim that only distance matters ... but that's not even remotely culturally acceptable, and I feel its extremely likely a similar taboo will be created to not fool around with your home robot.
Another example, the domestic help in the south both before and after the civil war (property before, "employee" after) it was generally considered scandalous to bang your maid. Not that it didn't happen behind closed doors, I'm just saying in polite company it was unacceptable even to discuss.
So yeah you might simplistically predict that domestic robots implies endless glorious fun robot sex, but I'm thinking based on observation that its mostly going to result in a cultural taboo against owner-robot sex.
Here's a puzzler, whats the minimum user interface required for Mavis to operate my marilyn-bot such that it'll not be considered creepy/taboo?
Another weird one I'm guessing AC is old (not that there's anything wrong with that) because Marilyn croaked a long time before I was born, but I could totally tolerate an Anniston-bot or a Dunst-bot or maybe a Swift-bot. Now is that just going to be a re-skin or merely upgrade the software or ... Also... copyright? If someone out there sells a VLM-bot do I get a cut of the revenue?
(Score: 2) by TK on Monday June 22 2015, @01:56PM
Any percentage of $0 is still $0.
I don't think it will ever be scandalous to bang your robot built for banging. Banging The Help can result in pregnancy or gossip, both of which can sully your reputation as a dignified, respectable land-holding owner of people. Banging your sister can result in freak babies.
Banging the bang-bot, on the other hand, just results in a mess that's easily removed from the detachable orifice of choice.
If you bang the robot that was built to take care of your kids, then it's weird. Those silicone milk dispensers weren't designed for what you're using them for.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by schad on Monday June 22 2015, @03:06PM
It was a reference to the TV show Futurama, and, somewhat humorously, you've unknowingly predicted much of the episode.
The plot is that Fry, one of the main characters and who was frozen for 1000 years, discovers he can download celebrity personalities to a blank robot and then make out with them. His (non-frozen) peers are horrified at his behavior; there is a strong taboo against sex with robots. They show him a campy educational film which includes the scene quoted. It's later revealed that the celeb personalities are actually unauthorized copies made from actual celeb heads, kept preserved in jars (heads in jars is a common theme in Futurama). So the rest of the story is around shutting down all the pirated copies of Fry's favorite celeb's personality -- Lucy Liu-bots -- and wrecking the operation that was doing it.
You really got it so on-the-head that it took until your last paragraph before I realized that you didn't actually catch the reference.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @03:11PM
Yeah I never watch that show, too predictable. Seriously.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday June 22 2015, @09:30AM
I have to wonder if you would refer the same way to more familiar robots like R2-D2 or C-3PO. I kind of doubt it. The level of interactivity, fluid movement and lengthy communication this robot seems to be capable of is quite extraordinary. It only takes a few good human-like interactions before even a pet rock with a smiley face starts to seem quite human.
Frankly, if this isn't some elaborate fraud being remotely operated by a human, this is the first robot I've ever seen that I would truly call a precursor to CHOBITS-style intelligent personal assistants. Actually it reminds me strongly of a robot in Time of Eve as well. This is the first robot I've seen that might be fun to have around the house, and might not bore me to death if I spent more than 15 minutes playing with it. If it's for real then it's an impressive achievement, and to top it all off it's only $2,000 USD. Very interesting.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @11:24AM
Buy a $100 dorm fridge and put it next to your desk like I did a long time ago, and save the remaining $1900 for more beer.
Note that most "computer" hobbies are not terribly energy efficient... compared to the average gamer or enthusiast the extra energy the fridge uses will be a rounding error.