Month: February 2022

I’ve been on a retro-kick recently, and I’ve been listening to some Isaac Asimov books on Audible.

During the Robot series there is a constant theme of some people distrusting robots. Despite being brought up on a diet of films where robots turn bad, I’ve never really shared this feeling.

Anyway, I thought I would test my brother’s family by showing them this video by Boston Dynamics.

My nephews were intrigued, but not totally phased by it. One said something to the tune of, it moves like a man in a suit, but it’s clearly not. My sister-in-law had a very negative reaction. She was wincing and saying it was horrible. It seems these robots are already “too human” for her tastes.

So in this regard, the predictions made by Isaac Asimov when he started to write about robots in the 1940’s were spot on. It’s going to take a lot of adjustment for some humans to feel comfortable around humanoid robots.

I, for one, welcome our killer robot overlords! 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. When I was thinking about the title of this post I had the song Kool Thing by Sonic Youth going through my head, because of Kim Gordon saying, “fear of a female planet”. I guess I could have been thinking about Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy.