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The musings / artistry of a west coast American.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Sex Dolls That Talk Back
This is the fifth episode in a Bits video series, called Robotica, examining how robots are poised to change the way we do business and conduct our daily lives.
Matt McMullen has proved that some people are willing to spend thousands on sex dolls.
Mr. McMullen, the creator of the RealDoll, says he has sold over 5,000 customizable, life-size dolls since 1996, with prices from $5,000 to $10,000. Not only can his customers decide on body type and skin, hair and eye color, but on a recent day in the company’s factory in San Marcos, Calif., a craftsman was even furnishing one doll with custom-ordered toes.
Mr. McMullen’s new project, which he is calling Realbotix, is an attempt to animate the doll. He has assembled a small team that includes engineers who have worked for Hanson Robotics, a robotics lab that produces shockingly lifelike humanoid robots.
Mr. McMullen is first focusing on developing convincing artificial intelligence, and a robotic head that can blink and open and close its mouth. He’s also working to integrate other emerging technologies, like a mobile app that acts like a virtual assistant and companion, and virtual reality headsets that can be used separately or in tandem with the physical doll.
One of the challenges that Mr. McMullen will have to contend with is the so-called uncanny valley. It is a concept first written about in 1970 by a Japanese researcher, that says people’s responses to robots will shift sharply from empathy to revulsion the more closely the robots resemble humans. In other words, something robotic that looks alive, but is not completely convincing, will creep people out.
In a paper, the researcher, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, likened the experience to encountering a prosthetic limb.
“We could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its texture and coldness,” he wrote. When that happens, according to Mr. Mori, “we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.”
With Realbotix, Mr. McMullen is trying to avoid that sense of uncanny by creating products that still look like dolls and not, as he says, copies of people.
Mr. McMullen says the Realbotix head, which can be attached to the existing RealDoll body, will cost around $10,000, and be commercially available in two years. The full body, which he will begin developing next, will most likely range from $30,000 to $60,000. — Emma Cott
New York Times
June 11th, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/technology/robotica-sex-robot-realdoll.html
"Yeah... I just had sex with a robot for the first time and it was... electrifying."
Does it constitute as cheating if you fuck a robot and your partner doesn't realize it? Hm. What a powerful philosophical question. (Not. It's just an inanimate object -- like that guy who was arresting for fucking a park bench http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/Man-who-had-sex-with-park-benc…. Not much difference just a more complicated inanimate object, that's all, and for women I suppose it would be a more realistic dildo surrounded by what could be considered a man but is actually a heap of rubber, plastic, and machinery.)
Does it really matter? I don't even find this debate that
intellectually challenging or stimulating. I think virtual reality will
be more interesting, though (where you are more a part of the machine
and can less tell the difference -- this is going to happen as well).
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Inside Mosul: What's life like under Islamic State?
Exclusive footage from Iraq's second city of Mosul reveals how Islamic State wields power over people's everyday life, a year after it was captured.
Secretly filmed videos obtained by the BBC's Ghadi Sary show mosques being blown up, abandoned schools, and women being forced to cover up their bodies.
Residents said they were living in fear of punishment according to the group's extreme interpretation of Islamic law.
They also described IS preparations for an expected government offensive.
The fall of Mosul marked the start of a lightning advance across the north that saw the army routed and hundreds of thousands of people forced to flee their homes.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
My life as a pro-Putin propagandist in Russia’s secret 'troll factory'
When Lyudmila Savchuk heard about the assassination of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov earlier this year she was shocked and saddened.
“I felt the bullets between my own shoulders,” she said, recalling how the Kremlin critic was gunned down near Moscow's Red Square in February.
Yet within hours of Mr Nemtsov's death, Ms Savchuk and her colleagues were going online to pour bile on the former deputy prime minister and claim he was killed by his own friends rather than by government hitmen, as many suspect.
“I was so upset that I almost gave myself away,” she said. “But I was 007. I fulfilled my task.”
The "007" role that Ms Savchuk refers is her own extroardinary one-woman spying mission, which has lifted the lid on the propaganda machine that props up the rule of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president.
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| Freelance journalist Lyudmila Savchuk (Dmitri Beliakov/The Telegraph) |
Friday, June 5, 2015
Schizophrenic teen, age 15, bludgeons his mother to death with a sledgehammer. A couple years later he decides he wants to talk to the media in order to be free again...
Dr. Phil
March 22nd, 2015
The hatred toward the mother is something a lot of schizophrenics experience. I don't know why but they always target the ones closest to them within the family. I still hurt when thinking about my brother (he died in 2002) having a condition he couldn't control.
I think Dr. Phil isn't a real therapist, that he asks a lot of his questions for ratings and emotional impact, but it's still a fascinating interview considering the guest.
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