Stepfather Factory

Here's a video I've always loved. It's actually about the rapper's own experience with an abusive stepfather but also comments on consumerism and on a surface level brings up questions about ethics in building technology. How well will they be made? Who will be able to make them? How safe will they be? How can we control all of this?

Programmable Matter

The future is going to be great. We'll have many things we can't even dream of but there are many things we can. One of those is programmable matter and one place they are researching this is at Carnegie Mellon University in America. Programmable matter will be an object that can change its form into anything it chooses by rearranging its constituent components (very simple small robots). They call it Claytronics. For now the problem is still in its early stages and researchers are still dealing with how to reconfigure modules of a robot on a larger scale. The aim however is to scale it down to the nano-scale where each robot is nearly as small as an atom. The robots then work together to replicate an object and can turn into whatever you choose. Maybe you don't like how your table looks today, well then just redesign it on the fly.

The idea can be extended passed just solid objects, it could extend to working devices too. An interesting device to have in the future would be a do-all gadget, a gadget that can turn into anything – this may be harder to achieve and need advancement in other sciences but I think it's attainable. Think of the iPhone 56 – one minute you are using it to make a phone call, the next shooting away, pumping lead into a T-1000. Well maybe not, Apple probably won't let that app through the appstore.

Here's a cheesy concept video that was made to portray what the future may be like with Claytronics. However, I'm sure your imagination can envision it much better.

Introducing Nao

Here I introduce to you the Nao robot of which I will definitely talking more about in the future. This video is a little old but it showcases what the robot can do and is a little amusing.

It is a medium sized humanoid robot built by the Aldebaran Robotics company and can be used as a base to practice Machine Learning techniques,  design robot AI or just to play with. The company sells it as an educational tool at the moment allowing people to research on it but hopes to launch it to the public in the near future. One of it's uses is in the Robocup - a football world cup for robots - which I'll detail more in later posts.

One great thing about the robot is that it provides a common platform for researchers to develop new techniques on. This allows people to just worry about the software part rather than the hardware and allows researchers to build on the work of others.

Anyway, here's the video.