#HERBIE the Robot

[brevoorthistoryofcomics]

BHOC: MARVEL SUPER-HEROES #77

Another week brought more new comic books, including this issue of MARVEL SUPER-HEROES starring the Hulk. Or, as he was billed on the recurring cover blurbs during this period, “Marvel’s TV Sensation!” I’d imagine that there were a lot of young readers who picked up their first issue of a Hulk comic book as a result of seeing the television show, and I wonder how many of them found it an alien…

[acmeoop]

Deadpool & His Insufferable Pals

Comic - Deadpool Annual #01 (Scott Koblish Cover)

[khymera2000]

i wish there was a more general term for people who really like sentient robots and machines in fiction the way the word furries can cover anyone who likes anthro animals in any way, theres objectum/techum but those seem to imply romantic or sexual attraction and while i do have some of those feelings for sure i also just like most of them of them in a i wanna be their freind way or just find them cool and or cute and have been fascinated with them since i was a kid.

[cornkretno-hip]

I hate him

[bigstepdisk]

Take a break, Creator ☕️

Clean version

[comicchannel]

Funko Pop Marvel Comics Fantastic Four H.E.R.B.I.E. - 564

Link para compra BR: https://amzn.to/3yeCmtw

Buy here: https://amzn.to/3UB9HWX

[larytello]

Some motivational reminders from some of my favorite cars!

Bonus under the cut XD

I mean, are you tired of being nice? Do you wanna go APESHIT??? KARR'S GOT YOUR BACK, GO APESHIT

[theomenmedia]

First Look At H.E.R.B.I.E From The Fantastic Four: First Steps Is Out Now

H.E.R.B.I.E. jolts into action in 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps'! Directed by Matt Shakman of "WandaVision" fame, how will this robotic wonder impact the team? Share your theories!

Check out the first look right here: https://www.theomenmedia.com/post/first-look-alert-h-e-r-b-i-e-powers-up-in-the-fantastic-four-first-steps

[enyter]

Ok. I offically hate Dr. Calvin.

[crossgauze]

i havent been drawing much, but getting an ipad has been helping my creative outlet through different means

[nellarw95]

Happy Birthday Breckin 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

Breckin Erin Meyer

May 7,1974

Buon Compleanno 🥳🎂🎈🎁🎉

7 Maggio 1974

[local-creative-cryptid]

(Click on images for better visual)

[my-timing-is-digital]

[ Ooc: Thanks, Asimov, for breaking my heart. Data will now be repairing Herbie and adopt him as his mind-reading robot son. ]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The REAL AI automation threat to workers

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Long before the current wave of AI hype, we were being groomed for automation panics with misleading stories. Remember this one? "'Truck driver' is the most common job in America. Self-driving trucks are just around the corner. How can we prevent America's army of truckers from turning into a howling mob when the robots steal their jobs?"

https://futurism.com/millions-of-jobs-are-at-risk-but-their-loss-could-be-for-the-greater-good

It was absolute nonsense. First of all, "truck driver" isn't a particularly common job in America! The BLS lumps together all cargo vehicle drivers under a single classification. The category error here was thinking that every delivery van driver, furniture mover, and courier is behind the wheel of a big rig, cracking wise on a CB radio as they tear up the interstate.

But what about automation threats? It's possible that if we redesigned the interstates to give 16 wheelers their own separated lanes, and then set them to following one another, that they could traverse long distances in that way. Congratulations, you've just invented a shitty, failure-prone train.

"Shitty train AI" does not threaten the job of the vast number of people the BLS classifies as "truck drivers." For one thing, "shitty train AI" isn't going to pilot a UPS van around the streets of a busy city with other road users. Sure, a few robotaxi companies have bamboozled city governments into conscripting the city's residents into an uncontrolled murderbot experiment. These are not going well:

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/9-key-leaders-depart-gms-cruise-amid-ongoing-investigation-into-san-francisco-incident/

More than $100b has been set on fire chasing the robotaxi dream, and the result is most charitably described as a technological curiosity, requiring 1.5 high-waged remote technicians to replace each low-waged driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

But even if we could perfect this technology, robots still wouldn't replace all those "truckers" who drive delivery vans (to say nothing of moving vans!). The hard part of driving a UPS van isn't just getting it from place to place – it's getting the parcel into the place. The robo-van would still need at least one person to get the parcel from the back of the van and into the reception desk, porch, or other delivery zone. It's not going to fire those parcels at your door with a catapult. It's also not going to deliver them by drones. Drone delivery is another one of those historical curiosities, capable of delivering a very narrow range of parcels, under even narrower circumstances:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#droned

If all UPS delivered was lightweight, non-fragile rectangular parcels ordered by people with large, unobstructed back yards, then sure. Congrats, you've just created the world's least-useful parcel delivery service!

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/amazon-drone-delivery-service-seeks-faa-approval-to-launch-in-2022/

All that said, the big rig drivers probably don't need to worry about robots stealing their jobs. It's not even clear that "shitty train" is within our technological grasp, but even if it is, there's yet another problem with the AI automation trucker jobpocalypse: "trucker" is already one of the worst jobs in America:

https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing/

It's hard to overstate just how fucking terrible it is to be a trucker. Truckers are trapped in abusive debt holes by their employers – who misclassify their workforce as "contractors" in a bid to sidestep labor law. Shriven of any labor rights, truckers are forced into the most ghastly, body-destroying, family-wrcking, financially precarious existence imaginable.

You can drive a truck for years, give almost all of the money you earn back to your employer (who denies that you're their employee) to pay back the usurious loan for your truck. Then, your employer can underschedule for shifts so that you miss a loan payment, and they can repo your truck and keep the six-figure repayment you've already made to them, leaving you destitute.

They can force you to work for hours – days! – without pay while you wait for loading and dispatch. They can make you drive long past the point of safety, then, if (when) you get into a wreck, they can fine you for not taking the mandated rest breaks.

Now, these drivers aren't about to be replaced by AI – but that doesn't mean that AI won't affect their jobs. Commercial drivers are among the most heavily surveilled workers in the country. Amazon's drivers (whom Amazon misclassifies as subcontractors) have their eyeballs monitored by AI;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

AIs monitor the voices of the (primarily Black, primarily female) workforce at Arise – homeworkers who field customer service calls for blue-chip companies like Carnival Cruises and Disney. They're listening for unruly children or pets in the background, and workers who fail to muffle these dependents lose the contracts they have to pay to train for:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/22/paperback-writer/#toothless

And AI monitors the conduct of workers on temp-work apps. If a worker is dispatched to a struck workplace and refuses to cross the picket-line, the AI boss fires you and blacklists you from future jobs for refusing to robo-scab:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork

Writing in The Guardian, Steven Greenhouse describes the AI-enabled workplace, where precarious, often misclassified workers are monitored, judged, and fined by algorithms:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/07/artificial-intelligence-surveillance-workers

Whether it's the robot that gets you disciplined for sending an email with the word "union" in it or the robot that takes money out of your paycheck if you take a bathroom break, AI has come for the workplace with a vengeance.

Here's a supreme irony: nearly all of the beneficial applications for AI require that AI be used to help workers, not replace them, which is absolutely not how AI is used in the workplace. An AI that helps radiologists by giving them a second opinion might help them find tumors on x-rays, but that's a tool that reduces the number of scans a radiologist processes in a shift, by making them go back and reconsider the scans they've already processed:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

But AI's sales pitch is not "Buy an AI tool and increase your costs while increasing your accuracy." The pitch for AI is "buy and AI and save money by firing workers." Given how bad AIs are at replacing humans, this is a bad deal all around, both for the worker who loses their job and the customer who gets the substandard product the AI makes.

There is a very limited slice of applications where an AI could make a lot of money for a company that deploys it, without costing that company anything when the AI screws up. For example, AI is a really good tool for fraud! Rather than paying people to churn out millions of variations on a phishing email, you can get an AI to do it. If the AI writes a bad phishing email, it's OK, since nearly all recipients of even good phishing emails delete them. What's more, no one will fine you or publish an op-ed demanding that your board of directors fire you if you buy an incompetent AI to commit fraud. Fraud is a high-value, low-consequence environment for using AI.

Another one of those applications is managing precarious workers who don't have labor rights. If the AI unfairly docks your worker's wages, or forces them to work until they injure themselves or others, or decides that their eyeball movements justify firing them, those workers have no recourse. That's the whole point of pretending that your employees are contractors: so you can violate labor law with impunity!

But that's not the ironic part. The ironic part is that "being a shitty boss" is the one AI application that companies are willing to increase their net spending on. No one buys an eyeball-monitoring AI so they can fire a manager. This is the one place where AI is there to augment, rather than replace, an employee.

This makes AI-based bossware subtly different from other forms of Taylorism, the "scientific management" fad of the early 20th century that saw management consultants choreographing the postures and movements of workers to satisfy the aesthetic fetishes of their employers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The pseudoscientific cod-ergonomics of the 1900s was demeaning and even dangerous, but it wasn't automated, and if it increased worker output, this was incidental to the real purpose of making workers move like the machine-cogs their bosses reassured themselves they were:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Every AI panic is a way of deflecting attention from the real, grimy, here-and-now ways that AI is destroying our lives by demanding that we entertain nonsensical science fiction claims about large, shiny existential risks that AI might present in the future.

The "X-risk" of the spicy autocomplete chatbot waking up and using its newfound sentience to turn us all into paperclips is nonsense. Adding words to the plausible sentence generator doesn't turn it into a superintelligence for the same reason that selectively breeding faster horses doesn't lead to locomotives:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

But there is a way that AI could destroy the human race! The carbon footprint and water consumption associated with training and operating large-scale models are significant contributors to the climate emergency, which threatens the habitability of the only planet in the known universe capable of sustaining human life:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2023/04/14/ais-unsustainable-water-use-how-tech-giants-contribute-to-global-water-shortages/

Likewise, AI isn't going to replace you at work. But it's already augmenting your shitty boss's ability to rip you off, torment you, maim you and even kill you in order to eke out a few more basis points for the next shareholder report.

Science fiction is a fun and useful way to tell parables about our current technologies. But it's not a roadmap for the future. The fact that sf writers like me found AIs as useful measures to describe Earth's dominant artificial life form – the limited liability corporation – doesn't mean that superhuman AIs should – or can – be created.

Back the Kickstarter for the DRM-free audiobook of The Bezzle, read by Tumblr's own @wilwheaton!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[loveueddie]

𝑯𝑨𝑷𝑷𝒀 𝑽𝑨𝑳𝑬𝑵𝑻𝑰𝑵𝑬'𝑺 𝑫𝑨𝒀, 𝑱𝑶𝑯𝑵𝑵𝒀'𝑺 𝑮𝑰𝑹𝑳 ۵

Pairing: Johnny Storm x Fem!Reader

Warnings: innuendo of sex, mention of sex, inappropriate language, Johnny being a cute boyfriend. Not yet reviewed.

You and Johnny have known each other since high school, through Reed. It turns out that having a similar IQ to Reed made you his best friend, when he met Sue, you were forced to meet Johnny Storm. At first, it was annoying, you hated his playboy and womanizing ways, he was always flirting with you and you had to put up with it every single day. It got worse when he and the others took the space trip where they gained their powers, he was always showing off his flames and attracting attention. You had to put up with him every single day, again, when you helped Reed officially found the Fantastic Four. Johnny was always winking, flirting, and touching you... until you discovered that everything he said was more real than the Thing's fake wig.

Johnny changed, the womanizing side was left aside, he changed for you. He fell madly in love with you just like you fell in love with him. He was always trying to make you feel special, in his own way. Sometimes when you were angry, he would bring you flowers, when he accidentally set them on fire because he was nervous.

Being Johnny's girl was not an easy task when your boyfriend is the most coveted and most admired man by women in New York. York. Even though Johnny told you every single day that you were his girl, you couldn't help but feel a pang of jealousy and possession when some random girl flirted with him, sent him letters with lipstick on his mouth, or winked at him.

But despite the jealousy, being Johnny's girl also had its good moments. All of New York knew you're the girl from the Human Torch:

Before heading to the Baxter Building for a day of work as Reed's assistant, you walk towards the coffee shop. To say the least you were late and that was never like you, the girl who was always right, punctual, intelligent and Reed's sweetheart. You blame the delay on your sister-in-law, Sue, who kept you up late showing you the wedding dresses she intended to choose for her wedding to Reed.

You enter the coffee shop, the bell ringing as you enter the place with the aroma of several different types of coffee. As soon as you approach the counter, the manager immediately smiles and says to the attendants the usual:

"Johnny's girl espresso!"

Johnny's girl. The title caught on everywhere and you loved being his girl. I mean, who wouldn't love to be Johnny's girl?

You were in the laboratory, making notes on what you and Reed could do to make HERBIE's intelligence more up to date, the robot was part of that crazy family of superheroes. You were doing it alone as Reed was busy making new installations in the Baxter Building, Sue and Ben were decorating the building with decorations for Valentine's Day.

Then your attention is taken away when you feel your reading glasses come off your eyes and Looking up, you see your boyfriend putting his glasses on his eyes and giving a charming smile.

"What do you say?" He strikes a playful pose, flexing his strong biceps through that skin-tight jumpsuit that makes you look horny just by looking at it. “Do I look smart and sexy?"

You pretend to roll your eyes and look at him, taking his glasses off his eyes. "No, you look even more stupid."

"Hey baby, that was mean of you." Johnny says placing his hand on his chest and pouting dramatically. "I'm Johnny Storm, I'm sexy and hot even if I were bald."

Johnny's smile was enough to make your legs go wobbly and you thank God you're sitting down. Johnny on the other hand, grabs your hands and pulls you up so you can stand up and he wraps his arms around your shoulders. "How's my girl?"

You smile, hands stroking his strong biceps on your shoulders. "Actually, I want to eat something."

"Really?" Johnny whispers, his brown eyes turning a darker shade and his voice full of desire. His hands, covered in black gloves, went down to your ass and squeezed lightly. "Because I'm hungry too. Very hungry."

You look at him, your eyebrow raised and biting your lip, because Johnny always had an insatiable thirst for you that happened when you least expected it and in the least expected place.

"Uh, uh." You place your index finger on his lips as he leans in to kiss you. "Last time you did this, we ended up getting laid here in my lab..."

"Yes, and it felt fucking good." He growls, biting your finger playfully.

"But it wasn't cool when Reed found out and had you wash the Fantastic Car with an old toothbrush after Ben ate nachos and burritos." You remind him and he groans in disgust at the memory.

"I'm going to ban all machos and burritos from this town." Johnny says with a look of disgust, but soon replacing it with a smirk. "But come on, we'll be careful this time. My girl likes naughty thrills."

Yes, damn, you did after you met Johnny and didn't know each other anymore. Johnny managed to corrupt Reed's innocent assistant with just carnal acts. You couldn't complain, the sex with Johnny was incredible and mind-blowing, after all, he had a lot of experiences before you.

But despite that, you deny it, maybe because Sue and Ben were walking back and forth with their Valentine's Day decorations, it wouldn't be nice to be caught by Sue or Ben.

"I promise that tonight beautiful lingerie awaits you in your dorm." You say smiling and Johnny's eyes light up like a child just getting candy.

"A lingerie, huh?" Johnny smiles. "You know, I wrote this in my letter to Santa Claus, but I didn't think I'd get the gift so soon. Any special reason?"

Typical of Johnny forgetting the dates and not noticing all the Valentine's Day decorations lying around . Sometimes he was distracted, like the last time he got lost on a car trip because he got distracted watching two ants having sex

"Today is Valentine's Day." You say, wrapping your arms around his neck. Johnny tries to hide his surprise with a smile.

"Y-yes, of course I did. I haven't forgotten. Pff, I would never forget the date of our first kiss." Johnny says. "Me? Never!"

You nod, suppressing your smile, finding his denials about not having forgotten that date cute. "Did you hear that?" Johnny says suddenly and you frown, not hearing anything. "Ben is calling me, he must have gotten stuck in the toilet again. I'll see you later, I love you!" Johnny kisses you before running out the door.

"I love you too." You say, even though he was already gone.

It was almost seven in the afternoon and you were locking the lab to go to Johnny's dorm floor to do the who promised, you were eager to say the least. This night would be unforgettable.

Or not.

Ben runs towards you looking panicked, panting as if he had run a marathon to get to you. You look at him confused, finding his behavior strange.

"Johnny was attacked on the terrace! We need his help!" Ben says.

His words were enough for you to run to the elevator and press the button for the building's terrace several times. Once there, you look around trying to find Johnny, already expecting to see the worst of your boyfriend.

But there was nothing.

Then, the sky is lit by something strong with yellow and orange colors. You look up at the sky and see your boyfriend flying with his body full of flames, waving at you with an arrogant and passionate smile on his lips.

You can smile in relief as he slowly flies towards you and extinguishes the flames when he lands on the floor.

"Ben said...oh my god, I'm going to kill him." You say hugging your boyfriend tightly. Johnny smiles, hugging you back and placing a kiss on your forehead.

"I'm fine, I asked him to do it." Johnny says, pulling away a little to look at your face, a smile playing on his lips. "You know I've always liked a dramatic entrance."

He points to the sky and your heart pounds with love for your boyfriend when he sees the sky in flames, something he did for you, written: I love you, my girl.

"Happy Valentine's Day, baby." Johnny whispers in your ear, gently kissing your ear.

"I love you." You smile, looking into his eyes and then up to the sky where Johnny's statement was written with his flames. He lit up the sky for her for all of New York to see his love for her.

"I love you more, my girl." Johnny kisses your lips, with love and fire. His lips moving against yours, bringing butterflies to your stomach. He pulls away and puts his forehead against his. “Are you still going to wear that lingerie? Because I think big Johnny is ready for action." He points to his groin.

You laugh, nodding your head. "Yes, my love."

You're definitely Johnny's girl.

[rwby-encrusted-blog]

Transformers aren't cars, They are Alien-Robot-People that can Turn into cars (And other Vehicles,) and are thus exempt from this list.