I don't see any spikes at all: Wait...is that a tiny flamethrower? Oh, no, it's just its little tummy.
Courtesy rcoderWell, I think robots should be scarier, anyway. And I mean classically, empirically scarier. A robot shouldn’t get a press release unless it could be nicknamed “crusher,” or “mecha-death,” or “slaughterbot.” Some crap like that, anyway. Even if a robot’s sole purpose is to, say, drop eggs into a carton, it should still have a buzz saw arm installed on it. For the sake of appearances.

I’m not suggesting that there aren’t scary robots out there. There are scary robots out there, very scary robots, but they’re full of the wrong kind of scary. Check out this little dude. For those of you who can’t access links, or something, here’s the dope: we’ve got a horrible little robo-creature that makes me think Casper the friendly ghost has been having sex with Volkswagen Beetles. iCub is what they call it, which is short for “iCub is designed to lay eggs in your mouth and burst out of your chest. iCub!” Ostensibly it’s designed to learn human language from the ground up, like a human baby, but look at the thing: those big eyes already have language, and they’re saying “I can’t wait to get my ovipositor down your esophagus.” Brrr.

No, I’ll take the T1000 over that any day.

Or, here, we have a little robot that was clearly designed to relate to its human coworkers. How can you look at a face like that and not think, “Oh, here’s something I can talk to.”? You can’t. But this robot will keep staring at you long after the interaction becomes uncomfortable, and then it will whisper things to you, like how it knows where you sleep, and how sad you’d be if something happened to your dog. Don’t argue—I’ve seen the schematics.

Now, with the new generation of walking robots we’re just starting to move in the right direction. Not this little guy, obviously. Robots that are just learning to walk should try to take attention away from the fact that they can barely do something that I’ve been able to do by myself for, like, ten years. The little MIT robot (linked to above), however, looks like something I might “accidentally” back over with my car. Whoops! Back to the drawing board.

A new robot out of the Netherlands seems to be stumbling towards where I want my robots. The name, “Flame,” needs some focus grouping, but it has potential, despite the fact that, as far as I can tell, there is no actual flame involved in the machine. It’s head looks sort of flamey, but they again so do teardrops. : (

Flame is upright, however, and approaching human size, both good signs. Again, though, its sole purpose is learning how to walk smoothly, which isn’t super scary. Unlike the stumpy shamble of man y other walking robots, Flame employs the human walking style of “falling forward in a controlled fashion” (how’s that for a metaphor for life). The hope is that Flame will provide insight on the mechanics of human walking; that it might aid in treatment and rehabilitation in people who already have leg injuries. Ironic, really. Not because humans should be teaching robots to walk, but because robots should be crushing their human creators, not teaching them how to walk. What a funny world.

Still, we can always dream.

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