The Blending of Man and Machine

Hanson Robotics has hit the media again with a new video of their "Albert Einstein" robot. Extremely like-like facial movements, and this time the talking head is attached to a body which moves around, as well.
Albert Einstein Hubo (video): Footage from the Hubo Labs
featuring the Albert Hubo.

For those of us just getting started, LEGO's MINDSTORMS NXT sets let you build and program robots to do all kinds of things, with various motors and sensors such as touch, light, sound, and ultrasound (to see). Not bad at all for only $250 !! A news story at Business Week has 9 short slides talking about the various aspects... pretty cool!


I know they've been working on this kind of thing for a while now, but SRI International has recently released their newest translation software to the military. Specifically designed for the current operation in Iraq, IraqComm can (almost) instantly translate spoken English to Arabic and then Arabic back to English. It seems to be working VERY well right now, but I can foresee a near future where it's possible that all the world's language boundaries are knocked down, and these devices could easily be included in cell phones... you speak your language in to your cell phone, and anyone listening (even conference calls) would hear the translation in their own language. Another few years, and we all might be walking around with permanent microphones on our clothes, and earbuds constantly tuned in to any number of tv, radio, phone, etc sources.
This will be one more step toward a desired cyborg... while you're at it... why not unable the earbuds with extra sensitive/telescopic hearing?

Popular Science has a new article out about "Futurist Ray Kurzweil explains how the boundary between man and machine is quickly disappearing. PLUS: A gallery of today's most mind-blowing 'bots' ". A VERY interesting read... including some advancements in robots (Nico) that are learning and becoming self-aware! Also WT-6, which is a robot that has an entire synthetic vocal chord system, complete with teeth, tongue, lips, lungs, the works! But, speech is "uncannily clear". I'm sure all androids will eventually have perfect human speech, will be able to speak (and translate) any known language, and will even tutor human students.

The near future IS moving toward one where humans are merging closer and closer to our technology. Already we seem paralyzed without our cell phones and internet connections, and it will only get more obvious and "needed" as more advancements are made at an ever increasing rate.

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