“Don’t walk with your phone! …Oh, your phone is…Walking anyway…Um…Carry on.”
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robotics
A tiny cyborg model at the moment, this contraption marks the beginning of robots taking over humanity.
A number of developed countries around the world are experiencing declining birth rates, as people focus more on building careers and social life than on repopulating for future generations. While lower birth rates aren’t necessarily a bad thing — they tend to arise from increased education in a society — it can prove worrisome for countries like Japan, which experts predict will see a population decline of more than 20 million people by the year 2040.
With a skyrocketing number of centenarians and not enough people to support them, what’s a country to do? There is the option of recruiting more women into the workforce, or increasing the number of immigrants to fill in the gaps, but with so many elderly people on hand, why not keep them working by giving them the power to get the hard work done with robotic exoskeletons?
The Mitsukoshi department store brought on Toshiba’s Chihara Aico as a temporary receptionist last month to test out her in-development voice recognition software. While she isn’t as advanced as some of her other employed robot peers, Toshiba is taking Aico on the road to promote her capabilities to businesses.
This weird old guy was spotted at the AsiaWorld Expo, an electronics expo held in Hong Kong recently, creepily undressing people with his eyes, as he stared lasciviously at passersby like some kind of RocketNews24 writer on a weekend bender.
Just as people were about to call the police, we presume, it was revealed that the creepy old guy, whose first name is, inexplicably, Ham, is actually just a robot that happens to look like a filthy old lecher…which kind of is maybe almost creepier.
As we speak, scientists in Japan are hard at work on inventing a myriad of robots whose sole raison d’être is to improve quality of life for humans. Whether it’s shoveling snow, helping people to walk, or generally spreading cheer through unbelievable cuteness and dexterity (we’re talking about you, Asimo!) it’s clear to see that robots are going to feature big in our lives during the years to come. But when a drawing contest was held in Japan for elementary school students to submit their impressions of a robot-filled future, one particular entry started to gain a lot of attention on twitter for being extremely creepy in an oddly knowing way…
The Japanese sure do love their robots, don’t they? It seems like every couple of months there’s a new robo-creation being unveiled to the public, sprung from the minds of Japan’s master robotic engineers. Today, we’d like to introduce you to this cute little trundling yellow fella, Yuki Taro! As we all know, winter is coming (we should probably say “winter is here”, but that has less dramatic punch) and with it a flurry of snowstorms and bad weather that can seriously disrupt people’s lives. And who really has the time or energy to shovel snow all day?
Enter Yuki Taro. This snow-gobbling little guy is here to make all your problems melt away – as long as they’re snow-related, that is…
Japan is no stranger to robotics. From Asimov to Gundam, hi-tech development in both real and fictional worlds is almost taken for granted. Some days, we even wake up feeling a bit disappointed that Ghost in the Shell isn’t a documentary–though even that seemingly becoming closer to reality every day.
Here’s one example of robotics enhancing the lives of stroke victims–and looking good doing it, too!
It appears that the fastest growing field of robotics is cockroaches. Once thought to be the domain of Roachbot and Roachbot 2.0, researchers from the university of North Carolina have raised the bar further with what has got to be the first functioning cyborg cockroach.