Footage making the rounds on social media shows what appear to be astonishingly lifelike humanoid robots posing at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week.
But instead of showing off the latest and greatest in humanoid robotics, two of the “robots” turned out to be human women cosplaying as futuristic gynoids, presumably hired by animatronics company Ex-Robots.
During the World Robot Conference 2024 in Beijing from Aug 21 – Aug 25, 🇨🇳 animatronics company EX-Robot (or EX Robots as reported by some news media) hired 2 women cosplayed as robots to spice up the exhibition.
The moment we’ve all been waiting for is nearly here!
Bringer of Light is finally set to be released on March 15, 2024! (Click the link to see a book synopsis and two brief excerpts; Smashwords also has an excerpt from the beginning chapters.)
Stop by Draft2Digital to see links to your favorite bookstore online!
UPDATE: I have some difficulty convincing D2D to distribute to Amazon. Therefore, I have decided to publish Bringer of Light directly on Amazon. Stop by here to order for Kindle (released March 15th). Paperback and hard cover are also in the works.
Diving into the topic doesn’t reveal that the world quietly experienced the opening salvos of the Terminator timeline in 2020. But it does point to a more prosaic and perhaps much more depressing truth: that no one can agree on what a killer robot is, and if we wait for this to happen, their presence in war will have long been normalized. It’s cheery stuff, isn’t it? It’ll take your mind off the global pandemic at least.
Actually, the truly scary “killer robots” would be much less like Terminator and more like the self-replicating ones in PDK’s “Second Variety” (or Screamers for those who haven’t read the original short…my recommendation? forget the B movie, read the story).
But there are already plenty of “semi-automated” machines that kill. It’s relatively easy to program a device to wait until someone approaches, and then shoot/radiate/explode. Strictly speaking, even basic landmines fit this definition.
What would help is the media stopping sensationalistic yellow journalism that throws around fear-mongering hyped-up headlines to sell copy.
Yeah, right. Like that’ll happen any time soon.
Machines killing without a human operator? Already here.
Machines seeking out and killing humans without pre-programmed responses and of their own accord?
We’re a long way away from that.
For now.
Maybe we just need to take away their control stones…
“Being able to get humans on Mars and actually collecting one of these samples would be such an incredible moment, I would kind of hope it would almost bring us back to the moon days of everyone being glued to the TV.”
Um. Well. OK. TV is dead so we’ll all be watching it streamed on our smartphones, but the point is taken.
And how much did they pay for this? đź’° đź‘˝ đź“ş
M Thomas Apple Author Page 