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Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Daily Dumb Dvorsky: Alone Again, Unnaturally Edition

I've got nothing against the idea of sending a cute bike-helmeted monkey-faced Astro-Boy knockoff toy into space with an astronaut. It sounds like a fine idea. Who doesn't like teddy bears? But that's more or less all the Japanese roboticists of the Kibo Robot Project are providing for Koichi Wakata as he prepares for his upcoming six-month stint on the ISS. But George Dvorsky is a futurist, George Dvorsky sees things differently, George Dvorsky sees the big picture, George Dvorsky's got his eyes on The Future. He can't just leave things there, at 34 red-booted centimeters of adorableness. "[B]ig things come from humble beginnings," he portentously intones. "Kibo" means "hope" in Japanese, did you know that? Kibo has an "ultimate purpose." Our society is becoming less communicative. Roboticists have the solution: Everybody needs to buy a cute can opener they can to talk to! All around the world, billions of humans are now isolated from one another, living alone, feeling lonely. Obviously, they need to spend more money buying appliances they can talk to instead of talking to each other. "Kibo" means "hope" in Japanese. Can't you just feel the hope?

2 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

By the way, I'm pretty sure you can't even fuck it. Some future.

jimf said...

> Everybody needs to buy a cute can opener they can to talk to!

I already have one of those.

But, you know, before cute can openers can be unleashed on the
world generally, they have to be guaranteed Friendly(TM) can openers.
So they won't, you know, start cutting people's fingers
off or punching holes in faces.

So donate to the Singularity Institute today!