June 26th, 2007 | Published in Robots, Progress, Quotes, Technology
What is it that we need all this extra intelligence to figure out? That we need all this new computer power to do? That robots will be capable of that we aren’t? What is the task to which we must surrender so much?
–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 224
May 21st, 2007 | Published in Robots, Quotes, Technology
Time magazine gave one of its awards for the best invention of the year in 2001 to “Slugbot,” a two-foot-high machine that patrols gardens using an image sensor, beaming read light, to pinpoint slugs, which emit a different a different infrared signal than worms or snails. Slugbot then uses a carbon fiber arm to pick up the slugs and store them in a fermentation tank, which turns the animals into electricity. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a flesh-eating robot that can support itself.
–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), 75