Through misfortune, psychosis, or the collapse of the economic system (topical!), human beings can end up with some strange jobs. No nine-year old has ever thought “I’m gonna grow up to harvest bull semen!” but somewhere, right now, a man is pulling on thick rubber gloves. And would still feel inadequate in bed if a circus tent full of cheerleaders shone spotlights on his equipment and screamed “That’s enormous!”
Robots don’t have that problem. Robots are specifically designed by experts for one useful task. Usually. Others were designed by “experts” who hate robots, humanity, or both. Here we look at three which weren’t and analyse them in terms of origin, occupation, and Risk Of Inevitable Self-Awareness.
1. Robotic facial massage
Invention: Roboticists at Asahi University watched Alien and thought “Man, that wimpy face-crushing alien died within minutes. An immortal metal-crusher could stay on there forever!” But if we want people to fall for it, we better call it a “face massager.”
Occupation: We’re no robo-techno-cybologists, but that’s clearly the Total Recall machine that drove Arnold Schwarzzeneger insane. Robot ethics might be a new field, but “Things which create mass-murderous Arnies” are right at the top of the list of Evil Machines, just above “TVs playing American Idol” and “Anything with red LEDs for eyes”.If something is going to be gripping our skull we’d prefer it actually understood what “flesh” is, and how much you can press before it breaks. The inventorturers of this thing make a big deal about the “torque limiter”, which tells the machine NOT to convert you into joint-lubricating skull-paste, but last time we checked torque limiters are still made of metal and unlikely to be on our side.
Risk of Self-Awareness: If this thing ever comes alive (and if science-fiction has taught us anything, it’s that it will – probably while being used by an improbably blond and attractive female scientist/reporter/scienporter) it’s going to find itself crushing somebody’s skull and think “Okay, this is what I’m supposed to do”. After that cities will be filled with decapitated corpses with puddles where their heads used to be, until the most extremely-helmeted armies in the world can stop it.
2. Robot Artist
Invention: Artists are an important part of human culture. Abstract artists are just people who figured out how to get paid for smearing various fluids on paper, and if you’re lucky those fluids didn’t come from you or them. In what must be a heroic attempt to embarrass these wasters out of action, the University of Western Australia developed “MEART – The Semi Living Artist.
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Occupation: The MEART draws random squiggles in art galleries around the world. It does this by sending signals to a remote robot body over the internet, and those signals come from chunks of rat brain jammed onto a multi-electrode array in a lab in Australia, and no you have not entered the Twilight Zone. So if you’ve ever wanted to see what a doodled representation of pure rodent terror and insanity looks like, wow, you’re in luck:
We’re also in luck, because the internet lets us write this far far away from your rat-robot psychoses.
One minute later: Where’s my baby? And why is MEART using so much red ink all of a sudden?Risk of Self-Awareness: Internet-enabled robots controlled by pieces of plague-bearing vermin jammed onto electrified spikes – that’s not just an apocalypse scenario, that’s from some nightmare Bond-villain game of Apocalypse Madlibs. A rat’s primary functions are “bite people” and “eat things”, and this arms it with hydraulic strength while surrounded by art gallery patrons – the least-able-to-defend-themselves humans outside a coma ward in a pygmy hospital.
3. Robot Pole Dancer
Invention: This is just ass backwards. Using a surplus of education to create strippers is like using forty gallons of napalm to freeze to death.
(alarming video here)Occupation: The hydraulic-hoes swing their stuff surprisingly well, and advanced study by men with labcoats instead of girlfriends reveals that they are only 80% as dead inside as real strippers! They also elevate sexual frustration to zen levels: many strippers simply won’t sleep with you. These ones physically can’t.
Risk of Self-Awareness: If Artificial Intelligence’s first look at humanity is the baying front row of a seedy strip joint, it won’t just exterminate us, it’ll wear thick rubber gloves while doing so. On the upside, “I was a Robot Stripper” is probably the only Jerry Springer plot that hasn’t been used yet.
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