Why I don't see a future of robots
Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 12:03AM 
WSJ story on how wearable glasses become the new computer interface.
A couple of generations after that (or maybe faster), all this hardware goes inside - and simultaneously losese its metal and becomes biological in content. Once you can surf the web from within your head, all sorts of fun and bad stuff follows, as hacking becomes its own threat of mind control. But people will augment their own bodies because that's the next evolution.
That reality, combined with nanotechnology allowing for more and more nets to be interwoven with our landscapes, is the primary reason why I don't see a future where such technology is housed within "serving" robots who, per the sci-fi genre, eventually turn on us. I think that whole concept is misguided.
That's not to say that robots won't matter, because they will in all sorts of ways. They just won't infantilize us by their presence, and they won't be the receptical for the really intimate technologies, which we will take into our bodies.
Reader Comments (2)
so instead a future of Borgs....
and on a lighter note: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3TAOYXT840
And they're already working on the step beyond that--if you can control a robot arm with your thoughts and an implant, how hard would it be to control a computer?
'course, being a fan of William Gibson novels and Ghost In The Shell doesn't make me biased in any way on this subject . . . :)