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posted by LaminatorX on Monday June 22 2015, @04:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the robot-grinder dept.

A story from ITWorld:

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 22 2015, @03:20PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 22 2015, @03:20PM (#199440)

    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.

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