Mind reading robot doesn’t know what to think

Pax Arcana
A few years ago, Honda introduced a small humanoid robot called Asimo that could do things like walk, wave, and savagely attack people by falling down the stairs at them.
The latest addition to the Asimo family is even more dangerous.
According to the Guardian (UK), the latest Asimo can read your mind — literally:
To control [...]

The robots are not sarcastic

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If you’re like me, one of your favorite pastimes is plugging some of the hilariously besnargled (new word) language on Engrish.com into a text-to-speech program and prank calling your friends with it. For example:

…and this beauty…

But why do the robot voices sound so silly? Science fiction told us we would have HAL-like computer voices [...]

The robots are more dangerous than ever

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Every time I write about the threat posed by armies of sentient, wall-climing robots, some naive sap writes in and chides me for overstating the danger.
OK, fine. Don’t listen to me.
But maybe you should listen to Patrick Lin, author of a report for the Office of Naval Research that concludes that our militarized robot [...]

Death comes nipping at your heels

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Popular science fiction films such as Star Wars and Maximum Overdrive have left us with an inaccurate impression of what the inevitable end-times war with the machines will look like.
In those films, the forces of mechanized evil spend considerable energy creating armies of terrifying robot warriors. While it is difficult to deny that this [...]

Tuesday filler: T-Pain v. Vocoder

Pax Arcana
And yet another layer in the robots’ diabolical plan is peeled back.

Escalators are about to get deadly awesome

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Not only are the nation’s escalators attacking old people at an alarming rate, they are also growing more powerful by the day.
According to the New York Times, some escalators in that city’s subway stations now have the ability to sense when humans are around and change speeds accordingly:
Using infrared motion sensors, the escalators will [...]

The robots will rock you now

Pax Arcana
Robots launching a violent war against man is a staple of science fiction, but let’s be honest for a second — that scenario is pretty damn unrealistic.
As anybody who’s studied the machinations of robot subversion knows, their real plan is to sneak in through our ear holes and plant subliminal messages in the microchips [...]

The robots are getting jumpy

Pax Arcana
Because science should not only terrify you, but also annoy you and give your dog a heart attack, researchers have devised a robot grasshopper that can leap 27 times its own height.

God damn it. This means I have to rebuild my anti-robot security fence to at least 28 times the [...]

AAAAAHHHHH!!!! AHHHHHHH!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Futhermore, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The escalators are trying to kill our old people

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The New York Times today reports a dramatic rise in the rate of escalator attacks against old people. In fact, the yearly rate of escalator injuries increased more than 100% from 1991 to 2005 — to an average of 2,660 sweet old ladies per year:
Nobody knows why the rate is rising. “Perhaps the exposure [...]