For The Love Of Androids: BabyBot Future

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CB2 (Child-robot with Biomimetic Body), unveiled June 1st at Osaka University


Alan Turing, P K Dick, Stanley Kubrick and a host of others might be impressed, but the public reaction has almost unanimously been one of fear - that its weird, uncanny, scary, frightening, creepy, despatch-the-Luddites-immediately, nightmarish, sick etc, though its kind may ultimately replace those other kinds of babies ...

A perpetually Undead Child in a child-centred world. No more babies. Long Live The Turing Android Baby!!


"A child-sized android with flexible joints and soft skin developed by the Japan Science and Technology Agency was unveiled Friday at Osaka University, where the agency's research and development team is based.


The 1.3-meter-tall, 33 kilogram humanoid robot has optical, auditory and tactile sensors. Fifty-one actuators inside its body run on compressed air and enable the robot to make complex movements smoothly.


About 200 tactile sensors are embedded in the robot's gray skin, which is made of silicon and other materials. The robot can react to its surroundings by blinking and altering its facial expressions.


The robot, which has the physical ability of a 1- or 2-year-old toddler, can turn over and stand up with assistance
."



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This "thing-in-itself", then, ‘a deep opacity, shadows in our understanding, a negation of interiority in our hearts.’ (Jean-Paul Sartre).

The giant baby robot or monster or humanoid has a few interesting visual precedents (films that again were disproportionately successful in Japan relative to everywhere else):

Son of Godzilla
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Donald Cammel's Demon Seed
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A.I. and 2001
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DJ PIMP

Well-known member
Babies can seem like poorly differentiated not-yet-persons, which is the feeling the robot gives me. Or, it's like a baby that has failed to develop while lacking the human depth that could produce a sense of empathy.

Japan...
 
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