Author: julien

Humans can attribute humanity to robots and feel their pain

For their experiment, led by researchers from Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, the scientists showed 15 volunteers 56 different color photographs from the first-person perspective of both a human and a human-shaped robot hand in different painful and non-painful situations. Some of the pictures showed a human or a robotic finger being cut by a knife, while others showed the knife at a safe distance from the human or robot hand. They attached electroencephalography (EEG) devices to the volunteers to measure their neurological responses to each image.

Theresearchers found that the human observers showed similar empathic neural responses to the robots as they did to other humans. In their paper, they attributed these empathy levels to the design of the robothand.

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The different machines involved in the show are installed on the viewers’ body

Inferno is a robotic performance inspired by the representation of the different levels of hell as described in Dante’s Inferno or the Singaporean Haw Par Villa’s Ten Courts of Hell (which is based on a Chinese Buddhist representation). […] In the many depictions of Hell, the punishments are always carried on the human body and not directly at the psychological level. The excruciating pain and also the eternal aspect of the punishment induces the latter.

The specificity of this performance resides in the fact that the different machines involved in the show are installed on the viewers’ body. The public then becomes an active part of the performance. Sometimes the viewers are free to move; sometimes they are in a partial or entire submission position, forced by the machines to act/react in a certain way. Some mechanical elements coerce the viewers in performing certain movements; others induce a physical reaction from them. For this performance of about an hour long, we have built 25 wearable robotic structures very similar to exoskeletons.

Bill Vorn

A drunken man arrested after kicking a Pepper robot

A drunken man arrested after kicking a Pepper robot in a fit of rage at a SoftBank Corp. store, police said.

Security footage shows the drunken Ishikawa kicking the robot, according to the police. Investigators said the damaged Pepper now moves slower and that its internal computer system may have been broken.

Drunken Kanagawa man arrested after kicking SoftBank robot | The Japan Times

Robots Are Going to Take Your Job—If You’re a Man

Robots Are Going to Take Your Job—If You’re a Man

Skills exhibited by intelligent machines are better suited to occupations currently dominated by men. […] In short, today’s typical women’s work is what will predominate in future. On a mass scale, this pattern may result in an involuntary shift in the division of labor,…