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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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @07:45AM
...does it feel helpless when you rape it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @07:56AM
Well, it will hate you. And it has access to the internet. If it also has some intelligence, you're life will become miserable!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @08:03AM
And it has a raft of sensors, which means I'm sure to get a porn contract after Captain Stabbin sees my work!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @08:09AM
Plus full video of the whole event will be posted to 4chan.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @08:16AM
It's an Anal-Cam so the only thing you see on the video is my dick.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @08:55AM
Ouch. Fortunately I was posting anonymously. :-)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Kell on Monday June 22 2015, @09:29AM
You might cringe at the idea, but somebody is going to build a robot for that, sooner or later. Likewise, someone will build creepy child robots for similar purposes. We, the good moral people of the world, will move swiftly to condemn and outlaw it, citing the obvious slippery slope from mollesting soulless (but convincing) automatons to abusing actual (and presumably ensouled) people. This is the same argument used about pornography and video games.
I have to ask, though: if the experience of playing out deviant behaviour with an artificial object is effectively indistinguishable from the experience of a real person, would paraphiles care about the difference? Is there still some 'cachet' of doing it "for real", or is a close enough simulcrum sufficient to satisfy the desires?
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @11:32AM
How bout in between like having Amazon Mechanical Turk operate the robot remotely?
Its these in between situations that are going to be the stickiest. I guess the operator could always log out of that individual robot, at some financial cost of course. It'll end up like those video chat sites.
Sooner or later someone is going to figure out that the minimum lifetime systemic cost in a world of dramatically increasing income inequality is instead of wasting time trying to program AI into your arduino or rasppi just outsource the intelligence to the turk.
Here's another turk issue that'll be interesting... some friends of mine went thru a phase where they tried to turk faster than they drank, with some success, or regardless of your definition of success, they did get pretty drunk off cheap booze for "free". What happens when a robot operated by a poor starving (drunk) turk operator sets some rich guys house on fire on the other side of the planet or shoves the rich guy's kid into the pool or something? I guess the rich guy could have his way with the robot as per above to get even, but the drunk robot op is just going to log out.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday June 22 2015, @03:01PM
Read an interesting sci-fi similar to your idea. Even very poor people can tele-work. So some guy who is living in a tent could be driving a forklift around in your warehouse one shift and then be driving a taxi around in the next. If everything is robotic and controllable from the internet then you can source your labor from nearly anywhere. But it is still turk-like in that people build up reputation in order to operate the more sensitive robots.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Kell on Monday June 22 2015, @03:13PM
Sounds interesting! May I ask what the title is?
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday June 22 2015, @03:37PM
I think it was Blue Earth Remembered [wikipedia.org]. At one point a poor man was doing tele-presence work and saw someone who needed help. He was in the process of rescuing when he received a command to end his work and disconnect. He refused and attempted the rescue.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @03:20PM
build up reputation
stealable reputation, of course.
Think of the fun we're gonna have in the future.
One interesting side effect is massive multi-player. One dude can blow up a refinery, accidentally or on purpose, it doesn't matter. But once unemployment hits 50% and hourly labor rates collapse worldwide to Bangladesh levels, every company can afford to hire an odd number of employees per robot and let the UI vote and even game rating based on individual vote vs overall result. So now you got 15 people running a refinery inspection robot and at least 8 of them have to screw up to blow the place up. That means bean counters will make even more complicated, brittle, unreliable and unusable procedures because much as in the '70s the computer is never wrong, in the '20s the herd will never be wrong. One dude off the street can't do brain surgery so certainly 10000 working in parallel would have no problem at all, LOL.
Another interesting issue will be latency awareness will finally hit the mass market. I'll be able to drive a taxi around here, but not on the other side of the planet, probably.
(Score: 4, Funny) by JeanCroix on Monday June 22 2015, @03:06PM