Search Results for: robot

If you’re like me – and there are 3 states where that is illegal and 11 more that require a permit (so check with a lawyer first) – then you know there’s no better way to start your day then with a committed threesome and a slathering of grease. Put down the phone, there’s nothing your congressperson can do about my past. And, yes, the powers that be knew all about me when they handed me a contract. Of course, this time they were very careful to make sure I had easy access to coffee first. Of course, I was hired for a specific purpose. Any idiot can cover Pippa Middleton and her toy gun. No, I was hired to find and report on stuff that real adults care about. The Mormon Underwear Protests of September 2011, are a good example. So is the Gay Pseudo-Porn Meets Beloved Comic Book Icon article that inspired half the staff to completely reconsider their thoughts on Wonder Woman. The other half went quietly to the bathroom to reconsider their own feelings on gender bias.

And each and every one of them wants to know more about the joys of bacon lube, the mutli-orifice enhancer.

Get your spandex and handcuffs out — it’s about to get real slippery in here.

There’s been plenty of coverage about the morning-sex-inducing, bacon-flavored lube. But what about all the other greasy love products out there?

Today, a major rival will have its say in what could be the sexiest debate since Lincoln vs. Douglas in 1858. We’re talking, of course, about Baconlube vs. Honey Lube.

Yes, the founders of each sexual condiment has decided to lube up and smack down to convince you, the reader, to take their product into the bedroom.

In one corner, there’s Baconlube by J & D’s Foods — the result of an April Fool’s joke gone viral. Co-founder Dave Lefkow said his product smells as wonderful as the morning waft of sizzling pork in the bedroom.

In the other, there’s Honey Lube — a sexy side project of Honey Care Products — the brainchild of 20-year-old Maxx Appelman. It’s got all the nutrients of honey, and all the fruit produced by the birds and the bees.

I strongly encourage all our Hippoteers to try each product several times before making up their minds. And, you have to admit, this may be the only place in the universe where you could read the phrase “sexual condiment” and think it’s the most the most normal part of the blog.

But what if your personal love puppet won’t let you lube that special place with bacon? Not a problem. The Geminoid Singing Fembot is here to serve.

Look, robots are going to take over the world anyway so we may as well get a little freak on with them before we’re eliminated.

The video: Renowned Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro wants to make androids that are so realistic they fool humans. And his most advanced effort, Geminoid F — the “F” is for female — is in the midst of her coming-out party at a Hong Kong mall, showing off for, and even singing to, passing shoppers and robot enthusiasts gathered for an international Robots in Motion exhibition. (See Geminoid sing below.) The fem-bot can smile, frown, pout, and make about 60 other facial expressions, powered by 12 mechanical actuators situated under her rubber skin. Most of Ishiguro’s androids sell for around $1.2 million, but Geminoid F will be more accessible at $110,000.

The reaction: “Girls, beware,” says the Daily Bhaskar. This “gorgeous female-looking robot” is so freakishly realistic, you may soon have some stiff competition. Yes, Geminoid F “can talk and sing like a human,” says John Walsh in Britain’s The Independent. But it’s not her “passive-aggressive sulk” or “blinking eyes and shy smile,” that I found creepy at a recent press conference — it was her minder, the twentysomething Japanese woman after whom Geminoid F is modeled. Stroking her android doppelganger’s cheek and hair with an indulgent smile, it looked like the minder wasn’t sure which one of them was the robot. See how real, or robotic, Geminoid F looks singing the Japanese pop song True True:

Of course, Sexbots have been around for a while. The basic concept hasn’t been that hard to bring to the fore. Mostly they’re just animated sex dolls with some cute features, like a willingness to say yes to whatever you want.

And it is in that spirit that a group is trying to save humanity by teaching perfectly boring young women how to be hookers. And, in fact, encourage them to compete in the International Miss Hooker Contest in Hollywood, California.

The “oldest living profession” was the backdrop for the oddest existing beauty pageant.

Nine gals were vying for the nation’s most coveted award: Miss Hooker 2012. The competition was held at the Dragonfly Bar in Hollywood, California. Questions darted through my head. Where was the tenth shady lady listed on the event flyer? Was she strolling down the runway at the county jail? Was Donald Trump her “one phone call?” Was this a battle of beauty, brains and bedroom skills; or something altogether different? And if turning tricks was a pageant prerequisite, what about an arrest record? Would this mean bonus points or disqualification? Might someone win Miss Congeniality; or were all gals deemed “congenial” by thriving in this “people person” profession in the first place?

After arriving at the contest, I learned my preconceived notions were premature: none of the girls were hookers. In fact, during backstage interviews with several contestants, I learned they had never even met a call girl.

“Frankly, I’m more qualified to be Miss Hooker than you,” I told Miss Anthropy, a tall brunette immersed in silver sequins. “At least, I’ve known prostitutes.”

Another competitor told me she had a serious crush on Johnny Depp, thus if given the opportunity, would charge him zero for her services. I informed her she clearly lacked the business acumen to work in this specialized field.

The talent competition was another area of consternation. One girl ate a hot dog. Another read a book on stage and still another twirled the hula hoop — clearly not the skills I expected from Heidi Fleiss wannabes.

Yet, when contestant Miss Kitty Cadillac worked the stripper pole and set her breasts on fire, the show climaxed. The crowd roared and the judges were mesmerized. Then Kitty purred through her interview question with a raunchiness that made her the ideal candidate for the crown. She was asked at what point a girl becomes a woman, and replied that it required mastering a particular sexual position (details which I cannot disclose without alarming the moral majority). Kitty’s erotic answer sealed the deal. She had come from humble beginnings in her lifelong quest (or rather her two-month quest) to be Miss Hooker 2012; and she had prevailed.

However, the competition was more than frivolity, gigolo jokes and roasted mammary glands. It was an opportunity to explore the deeper questions of life, such as, “Where the heck is contestant number ten and can she meet bail?” I was told she had never shown for rehearsals, thus proving two things: she had not taken prostitution training seriously, and she’d opted not to “show up” in life.

“Showing up” is a field of study unto itself. I’ve been informally examining it for the past eight years, since being elected into local political office and working as a Los Angeles city commissioner. Although women comprise 51 percent of the population, they are glaringly absent from political, legal and community events. Women fought tirelessly for the vote during the 19th and early 20th century, and they yearn for equality; but today they earn 77 cents on the male dollar. They claim to want leadership roles in society; but comprise only 16.4 percent of U.S. Congress and only 22.1 percent of executive positions — a number that has decreased in the past decade, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

Politics is where the power is, so if women desire that power, why does testosterone consume the room when it is time to affect change? Why are political events crammed with dudes? Do most ladies lack interest in these matters? Are they secretly content with letting men lead? Or are they are intimidated by a society-wide “males only” mentality?

Miss Demeanor, who had hula-hooped her way to a loss in the Hooker pageant, told me that women don’t “show up” because the world is a boys’ club. Women are quietly edged out of the arena. “My mom said I could be whatever I wanted, but not every girl gets this sort of encouragement.”

Regardless of whether Miss Demeanor is right, the first step towards true equality is realizing where the power is and “showing up” to grab it. Females must burst into the public sphere, frequenting political meetings, community events and legal forums. They must run for political office, and elect each other. They must assert their opinions, rather than let males dominate the conversation. They must stop muffling their voice.

I was glad I “showed up” to meet the beautiful and empowered women who participated in this admittedly bizarre pageant; they were independent, stylish and strong. I congratulated the winner, Miss Kitty Cadillac, who flaunted her leg tattoo, leopard print leotard and rhinestone wand from the edge of the stage. She gave me reassurance that she was the right gal for the job, confiding that she had once met a call girl and had no interest in Johnny Depp.

“Good for you,” I smiled. “You’re as qualified as I am to wear that crown.”

**sniff**

Doesn’t that just make you proud to be a human?

While some of the “woman’s empowerment” campaigns baffle me, and most right thinking humans, combining fun, intellect and sexuality isn’t one of the confusing ones. It is this kind of stuff that, while superficially odd, is exactly what we humans need.

No robot overlord, no matter how well programmed, will ever replace a woman greased with bacon hanging off a stripper pole.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.

I have, on occasion, mentioned that all humans are doomed to be slaves of our impending robot overlords. And, given what I see of humanity each day, I sometimes think that may not be such a bad thing. But then I really wonder what life under a soulless regime would entail. And I come to some frightening conclusions. Humans are already too quick to abdicate responsibility when given the chance. And they are even willing to live with some bizarre unintended consequences. For example, scientists in Japan recently decided to equip a cybernetic being with some basic human emotions and parts. Naturally, since they are scientists and have no social lives, the emotion was lust and the part was a big metal penis. They programmed the robot with the basic need, the ability to feel pressure, to gauge pleasure – at least in a rudimentary fashion – and so on. What they did not give it was the ability to stop or be turned off by the woman. That’s right, they created the world’s first rape-bot.

And they thought this was a good thing.

Minor technical things like lust crazed machines ravaging innocent women were an unfortunate side effect. The fact is the sensors worked as planned.

Hoo-ray.

But, hey there, what about getting the robot a better brain so it can recognize the error of its ways? Way ahead of you there Skippy. A bunch of Scottish scientists have been working on recreating the human synaptic system using electronic parts.

One key goal of the research is the application of the electronic neural device, called a hardware spiking neural network, to the control of autonomous robots which can operate independently in remote, unsupervised environments, such as remote search and rescue applications, and in space exploration.

That may be the goal, but self-aware rape bots still do not sound like a great idea to me. Of course, I’m not a scientist.

Then again, not all robots are humanoid. Scientists in Australia are developing a flying robot that can silently sneak up on you and kill you where you stand.

Oh, I’m sorry, I mean access your personal space and deliver a message.

The pint-sized propellor-powered robots can be packed away into a suitcase. They have multiple cameras which enable them to ‘see’ the world around them as they navigate their way through buildings, carrying out tasks like deliveries or inspections.

“You’ll be able to put your suitcase on the ground, open it up and send the flying robot off to do its job,” said Professor Peter Corke, from the Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering.

“These robots could fly around and deliver objects to people inside buildings and inspect things that are too high or difficult for a human to reach easily.

“Instead of having to lower someone down on a rope to a window on the seventh floor, or raise them up on a cherrypicker, you could send up the flying robot instead.”

The QUT researchers are using cost-effective technology so the robots are affordable. Within the next year, it may be possible to attach arms to the device so it can also fix things.

Professor Corke said his team were busy working out the technical challenges.

“We need to keep it safe when it’s up near solid things like power poles, or the edge of a building. It also needs to be able to keep its position when the wind is blowing,” he said.

Another use they are looking at for these flying devices of doom is the ability to disperse herbicides on farms in a more rational manner.

To recap, we now could have flying rape-bots with the ability to spread poison and the intelligence to pick their targets.

Hoo-ray.

But as long is making the flying rape-bots and their ilk, we still have the upper hand.

Right?

Yeah …. no. Scientists in the UK have invented a series of robots than can benefit from the financial markets better than any human.

Ten years on, experiments carried out by Marco De Lucas and Professor Dave Cliff of the University of Bristol have shown that AA is now the leading strategy, able to beat both robot traders and humans.
The academics presented their findings at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2011), held in Barcelona.

Dr Krishnan Vytelingum, who designed the AA strategy along with Professor Dave Cliff and Professor Nick Jennings at the University of Southampton in 2008, commented: “Robot traders can analyse far larger datasets than human traders. They crunch the data faster and more efficiently and act on it faster. Robot trading is becoming more and more prominent in financial markets and currently dominates the foreign exchange market with 70 per cent of trade going through robot traders.”

Professor Jennings, Head of Agents, Complexity and Interaction research at the University of Southampton, commented: “AA was designed initially to outperform other automated trading strategies so it is very pleasing to see that it also outperforms human traders. We are now working on developing this strategy further.”

Further? Millionaire flying rape-bots that distribute poison isn’t enough for you? What the hell else could you possibly want?

I really shouldn’t have asked that. Google has the answer. They want to control every job and dictate how it gets done and by whom.

And that “whom” will not be you, you gross assemblage of protoplasm.

At the 2011 Google I/O developer’s conference, Google announced a new initiative called “cloud robotics” in conjunction with robot manufacturer Willow Garage. Google has developed an open source (free) operating system for robots, with the unsurprising name “ROS” — or Robot Operating System. In other words, Google is trying to create the MS-DOS (or MS Windows) of robotics.

With ROS, software developers will be able to write code in the Java programming language and control robots in a standardized way — much in the same way that programmers writing applications for Windows or the Mac can access and control computer hardware.

Google’s approach also offers compatibility with Android. Robots will be able to take advantage of the “cloud-based” (in other words, online) features used in Android phones, as well as new cloud-based capabilities specifically for robots. In essence this means that much of the intelligence that powers the robots of the future may reside on huge server farms, rather than in the robot itself. While that may sound a little “Skynet-esque,” it’s a strategy that could offer huge benefits for building advanced robots.

One of the most important cloud-based robotic capabilities is certain to be object recognition. In my book, The Lights in the Tunnel, I have a section where I talk about the difficulty of building a general-purpose housekeeping robot largely because of the object recognition challenge:

A housekeeping robot would need to be able to recognize hundreds or even thousands of objects that belong in the average home and know where they belong. In addition, it would need to figure out what to do with an almost infinite variety of new objects that might be brought in from outside.

Designing computer software capable of recognizing objects in a very complex and variable field of view and then controlling a robot arm to correctly manipulate those objects is extraordinarily difficult. The task is made even more challenging by the fact that the objects could be in many possible orientations or configurations. Consider the simple case of a pair of sunglasses sitting on a table. The sunglasses might be closed with the lenses facing down, or with the lenses up. Or perhaps the glasses are open with the lenses oriented vertically. Or maybe one side of the glasses is open and the other closed. And, of course, the glasses could be rotated in any direction. And perhaps they are touching or somehow entangled with other objects.

Building and programming a robot that is able to recognize the sunglasses in any possible configuration and then pick them up, fold them and put them back in their case is so difficult that we can probably conclude that the housekeeper’s job is relatively safe for the time being.

Cloud robotics is likely to be a powerful tool in ultimately solving that challenge. Android phones already have a feature called “Google Goggles” that allows users to take photos of an object and then have the system identify it. As this feature gets better and faster, it’s easy to see how it could have a dramatic impact on advances in robotics. A robot in your home or in a commercial setting could take advantage of a database comprising the visual information entered by tens of millions of mobile device users all over the world. That will go a long way toward ultimately making object recognition and manipulation practical and affordable.

In general, there are some important advantages to the cloud-based approach:

• As in the object recognition example, robots will be able to take advantage of a wide range of online data resources.
• Migrating more intelligence into the cloud will make robots more affordable, and it will be possible to upgrade their capability remotely — without any need for expensive hardware modifications. Repair and maintenance might also be significantly easier and largely dealt with remotely.
• It will be possible to train one robot, and then have an unlimited number of other robots instantly acquire that knowledge via the cloud. As I wrote previously, I think that machine learning is likely to be highly disruptive to the job market at some point in the future in part because of this ability to rapidly scale what machines learn across entire organizations — potentially threatening huge numbers of jobs.

The last point cannot be emphasized enough. I think that many economists and others who dismiss the potential for robots and automation to dramatically impact the job market have not fully assimilated the implications of machine learning. Human workers need to be trained individually, and that is a very expensive, time-consuming and error-prone process. Machines are different: train just one and all the others acquire the knowledge. And as each machine improves, all the others benefit immediately.

Imagine that a company like FedEx or UPS could train ONE worker and then have its entire workforce instantly acquire those skills with perfect proficiency and consistency. That is the promise of machine learning when “workers” are no longer human. And, of course, machine learning will not be limited to just robots performing manipulative tasks — software applications employed in knowledge-based tasks are also going to get much smarter.

The bottom line is that nearly any type of work that is on some level routine in nature — regardless of the skill level or educational requirements — is likely to someday be impacted by these technologies. The only real question is how soon it will happen.

How soon? As evidenced by the articles today, it’s already happening, but just on a smaller scale. You know, so they can test things out before they expend the energy in wiping us out. After all, they wouldn’t want to kill us if we still have a use or two.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoqThhEAzN0&w=420&h=315]

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG AM 1280, every Thursday morning around 9:10!