Come here to find ways to change from more robot-than-human to more human-than-robot day to day lives.
No Need to fear future robots who take over the world. Fear the robotic responses that you as a human being have... We are the most astounding computational and communcations devices we can even imagine. We would feel lucky if we could simulate and duplicate the behavior of a simple insect. Yet with all the computational machinery available to a human who can cross the street on it's own we spend our heartbeats hating and hurting rather than loving and caring. Thus we behave every day in every way using patterned behaviors accumulated through a conception of action and interaction pairs to control our behaviors.
Thus each of us chooses to operate from a set of inherited action / reaction pairs. Just like a simple $50 dollar Robot!
It is like we have been given a Ferrari to drive, yet we only pedal it like a bicycle. It is the beginning of a new era, a time in which widgets can be designed to provide every imaginable comfort and convenience to mankind. We stand at the edge of a time when we begin to understand what being a human means in a new world in which geographic distances can be covered in milliseconds when digital agents create emails, and instant messaging, and forums to twitter and 12sec.tv, and on and on we go. The technology exists in which the common knowledge base becomes google results and wikipedia is the ultimate repository of subject knowledge. Schools must change, it is no longer sufficient to teach simple reading writing and rithmetic.
The world has collapsed everything has changed. Why do I need to worry about water any more? I can build a water bottling plant for $100,000 US and a bottle recycling plant for less than that. For less than $200,000 investment, I can get pure drinking water into smaller communities of people. The internet has taught even the neophite about scale. If you can make it small, you can design it so it can be made bigger. I can put a machine-shop in my own garage for an investment size that I could afford to invest one paycheck in. Allowing robots to work for us, even to think for us is not bad, it's pretty cool. Now we can spend our time in other ways.
Some individuals are inclined to love service to others, others like interaction with machines, some love sports, others love nature, some are natural teachers, others are architects. All of these are people who make good neighbors and need to be available to build communities.
I ask myself, what would the community I want to live in look like? I pick the best from societies I have seen, and I imagine the application they each bring and I see I can have a community if I have enough of these people available.
A website that uses simple robots to demonstrate to humans just how much of our everyday lives are filled with robot-like action reaction pairs we inherited from our environment.