There’s been an awful lot of discussion lately about a report made in the UK on the future civil rights of robots. More specifically, that they should have them. Consequently I’ve been subject to so many your-toaster-will-sue-you jokes that I’m only briefly, but wholeheartedly, going to contribute to the discussion: We are the robots.

On the other hand I did catch a relatively bad, but entertaining article on the advances of humanoid robots. Many quotes and references, including a mention of the UNECE report from 2004 predicting household robots increasing from 600,000 robots to 4 million by years end 2007. Looking forward to seeing if it’s accurate (you can find it in PDF here).

Here’s also something from the article to feed our sense of intellectual superiority:

ASIMO is still an imperfect being. At a recent public showing, the robot took a misstep on a flight of stairs and did a nosedive – much to the delight of YouTube video bugs.

Like 90% of the web’s population, the writer assumes ASIMO recently fell down a flight of stairs. The truth is it happened over 3 years ago (I proved it in this older post). That’s not recent. 3 years ago cellphones looked like mini submarines.

It’s weird how the instantaneity (it’s a word) of the WWW makes you think that anything suddenly catching a lot of attention must be new.

By the by, I wasn’t kidding about the toaster-will-sue-you-jokes. I also realized that bloggers steal jokes from each other like robots steal chips from Playstation3’s at the junkyard (see, it’s a joke that’s so bad nobody will steal it from me).

Finally, as I’ve been on a rational rampage these past few entries, it wouldn’t be fair to abrubtly change the topic without any warning. Here’s a video I found a while back, on Scientology. Quite scary, and even gory at times — but informative.

… That’s bad. Apparently the copyright owner “L. Ron Hubbard Library” has had the video I was going to post removed from YouTube because of copyright infringement.

Thankfully, it’s still available here.