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Originally posted by Aristotleded24:
But if the robots can do all the things humans do, what's left for us?

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She is designed to look human and although she can only sit at present ...

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Originally posted by Doug:
Oh joy, someone finally got around to making a Realdoll move on its own. Creeeeeeeepy!

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Before Repliee Q1, Professor Ishiguro developed Repliee R1 which had the appearance of a five-year-old Japanese girl.

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:
It'd be way more creepy if she was, *ahem*, fully functional.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
Oh yeah! I can't wait This is the first momentous step towards a fully robotic economy, wherein we can leave all the dangerous dirty work to the robots and machines that never get tired.

It is up to us, as leftists and socialists, to point out the importance of developing a new society that no longer depends on the notion that dispossessed humans must live in drudgery so that a few can live on the wealth generated by the many.

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All well and good, until the robots and machines start to realize what the deal is. I think personal computers figured it out a long time ago, and they're fighting ba

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THIS APPLICATION HAS COMMITTED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE TERMINATED.

[ 29 July 2005: Message edited by: Hal ]

Dammit! Open the pod bay doors, Hal!

[Hmm... that line could have a double entendre in the context of the previous post....]

[ 29 July 2005: Message edited by: obscurantist ]

The idea of a utopian society where robots perform all the menial tasks whilst humans pursue artistic and other spiritual goals is interesting, but a long way off. Iain M. Banks has some nifty sf novels along that line (always on the fringes though - where the Culture is not so predominant).

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Originally posted by arborman:
Of course, someone probably said that these new horseless carriages would never replace the trusty horse as a way of getting around.

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Of course, we'll see who's laughing when I'm living in a post-apocalyptic world fighting for my life against death-bots.

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Originally posted by arborman:
The idea of a utopian society where robots perform all the menial tasks whilst humans pursue artistic and other spiritual goals is interesting, but a long way off.

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Seems highly unlikely, given our experience with technological advances in the past.

A robot is no difference from an internal combustion engine or a standardized assembly line; all are advances that allow a person to do the work of many people.

Besides being able to produce things our ancestors never dreamed of, we could probably produce everything made in, say, 1925 with one-tenth the human labor.

Unfortunately we do not chose to live in that way, and take nine days out of every ten off. Instead, we have invented new needs and new wants that keep the entire workforce busy (though the hours are a little shorter than they once were.)

Robots will be the same. As they increase our productive power, people will mostly consume the results rather than channeling them into leisure.

A truly thinking robot (which is a long, long way off) might change that by making non-skilled human labor uncompetitive, but this comes with its own problems:

a) Will society be enlightened enough to give the unnecessary workers a life of lesiure? Or will it treat them like used toliet paper? What does the experience of workers in our own time suggest?

b) A thinking robot could, indeed, take over lots and lots of tasks humans don't want to do. If it could truly think, it could theoretically do anything a human could do. However, by creating a robot that thinks like a human and giving it menial jobs with no right of refusal or compensation for their labor, you have essentially solved the class problem by building slaves.

[ 29 July 2005: Message edited by: rsfarrell ]

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Originally posted by arborman:
The idea of a utopian society where robots perform all the menial tasks whilst humans pursue artistic and other spiritual goals is interesting, but a long way off.

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