Angry. Angry, angry, angry. Let me start with asking this; what is the purpose of creating this? If it was about prosthetics alone, then he would have mentioned that first. That really was an afterthought, wasn't it? His first, stupid thought was: "let's give a machine a sense of touch."
Vausch said:
My first thought: Wow, this means that people with robot limbs will soon be able to feel again if we manage to connect the limbs to nerves!
First comment: Sex bots!
Dammit people XD
Right?! How many times have I seen an announcement like this and thought, "this bastard is thinking about fucking it RIGHT NOW. Look at his face. He is eying those positive results like a piece of candy. If he bites his lip I'm outta here." The Facebook comments were no exception. I saw one thing that annoyed me far more than the idea of sex bots, which I didn't think was possible... an undying kitten droid. Jesus. Are we so brainlessly afraid of death that we want to make BEING ALIVE obsolete? Yeah, who needs real, beautiful love when you can make your WAIFU and her FUCKING CAT.
Is no one else enraged by this? Annoyed, even? I know every time science makes a leap forward someone uses the Frankenstein comparison, but isn't it apt here at least? This obsession with creating humanoid robots, not for any purpose (there's always weak excuses like "uhhh... less scary to the elderly?") but just to prove we can is so short-sighted and pointless. I'm far from religious and even I find it too much like playing God.
I've never understood the necessity of making a face that falls deep into the uncanny valley with a billion processes to make an eyebrow twitch when we COULD be making all kinds of useful things. The most useful robots won't look like humans... just human-like locomotion would be needlessly excessive. Look at R2-D2. Adorable with the short stature and the little whistles, but more importantly there is no wasted space on its frame. Every one of those blue lines conceals a tool that can be used. I still hold up R2-D2 as the best fictional example I've found of what we SHOULD be working on in robots.
