#i will never forgive dreamworks for not making them cousins

[mialicassi]

reposting again bc i am so fucking in love with everything ab this comic.

my favourite cousins (rtte edition)

[whenyoujustwannawrite]

I was tagged by @remake-my-day (Thank you so much!)

rules: answer all of the questions, add one question of your own and tag as many people as there are questions (I don’t know that many people, so as many as I can.)

1. coke or pepsi: Don’t kill me, but I don’t get the difference. 2. disney or dreamworks: Dreamworks 3. coffee or tea: Uhh none. I pretend I’m lactose intolerant but I just don’t like drinking milk except in milkshakes. 4. books or movies: Sorry, can’t choose. If you’re saying the book or its movie, I’d choose the book, usually. 5. windows or mac: Windowsss 6. dc or marvel: Marvel but I have to say I love dctv 7. xbox or playstation: Not a gamer, but I’m thinking of trying it out 8. dragon age or mass effect: See above answer 9. night owl or early bird: NIGHT OWL. I woke up at 11:30 am just this morning. 10. cards or chess: Uhhh I haven’t played either enough times to make me able to choose.

11. chocolate or vanilla: I would die- no, scratch that- I would live for chocolate

12. vans or converse: Converse ftw 13. Lavellan, Trevelyan, Cadash or Adaar: What? 14. fluff or angst: I prefer fluff but angst is nice, too 15. beach or forest: Forest! Sand annoys me 16. dogs or cats: Dogss them cuties 17. clear skies or rain: Can I choose drizzles with sunshine? 18. cooking or eating out:Depends 19. spicy food or mild food: Mild. My cousin actually never fails to tell the story of that one time I found ketchup from those bottles they keep on the table spicy. (That ketchup was, like, half Tobasco sauce, I swear!) 20. halloween/samhain or solstice/yule/christmas: We don’t really celebrate Halloween here (yes, it’s a shame) and Christmas is just an excuse for a holiday in my house, but unless you’re Christian, people don’t celebrate Christmas where I live. 21. would you rather forever be a little too cold or a little too hot: Cold 22. if you could have a superpower what would it be:The ability to travel between alternate universes or omnilingualism (Google it) 23. animation or live action: Depends 24. paragon or renegade: Again, not a gamer 25. baths or showers: Don’t mind anything. Usually, I do a little of both.  26. team cap or team ironman:IRONMAN FOREVER BOO CAP (sorry) 27. fantasy or sci-fi: Can’t choose, again 28. do you have three or four favorite quotes, if so what are they:

“We are all stories, in the end.”

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.  ”

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”

“No one knows anything. Anyone who tells you they do… is full of bollocks.” 

Note: I’m leaving out an entire library of other quotes, these are just some of my favourites off the top of my head.

29. youtube or netflix: Youtube 30. harry potter or percy jackson: I WILL NEVER NOT LOVE PERCY JACKSON. 31. when do you feel accomplished:When I do  better than someone else I admire (and still respect, but they are something I want to be, and so  I surpassed a kind of goal.) 32. star wars or star trek: So I’ve only now started Star Wars (only now meaning i saw the first movie and a half of the second a month ago, but slow and steady wins the race, right?) but I do genuinely like Star Trek so I’ll choose that 33. paperback books or hardback books:Hardbacks. They’re sooo pwweerrttyyy (and, unfortunately, just as expensive.) 34. to live in a world without literature or without music: I’d rather die. 35. pale faded colors or vibrant colors: Either. My aesthetic choices are erratic. 36. good characterization with a bad plot or a good plot with bad characterization: I hate both options, but if I have to choose- good characterization. 37. favourite disney movie: Wreck- It Ralph! 38. tv show adaptations or movie adaptations:Whatever fits best. 39. museum or library: Library, no hesitation 40. high school musical or camp rock: Camp Rock 41. three songs that have a special meaning to you: Heroes (Alesso and Tove Lo), Extraordinary (Lucy Hale) and Waving Through A Window (Ben Platt, but just search for Dear Even Hansen). I have 4 or 5 more but well. 42. favourite flower: This question. So there’s this flower locally called the helicopter flower but I have yet to find the real name because, apparently, a few other flowers are also called helicopter flowers and look nearly the same but aren’t. So yeah. 43. who would play you in a movie of your life? I have no idea. Me? (I know that’s dumb, forgive me.) 44: favorite word/phrase? My favourite word is (not very eloquent but) “awesome” and phrase hmmm “I don’t give a shit”.

My question: Do you have a weird talent? If yes, what is it?

tagging:@teacup13 @giulswrites @justslowlywritingitall @adamantseal @randomguywithwords @spilled-thouqhts @deadsensescompany @inksomniac @abillionlittlethoughts @gracebabcockwrites @shania-pinto @harshishah1d Thank you for bearing with me. Please do this, I would love to get to know you!

[barrenharold021-blog]

What should be the emotional bond between children and robots?

When I brought the robot home from the Apple Store, I knew I was inviting a new kind of strangeness into our lives. My wife worried about giving our 4-year-old son a(nother) digital thing, a “smart” thing. I worried that he wouldn’t know what to make of it. Or that his little sister would break it. Or that I’d be jealous. Because I have always wanted a robot.

This one was Cozmo, a $179 gadget produced by Anki, which has taken more than $200 million from venture capitalists to bring “artificial intelligence and robotics to our everyday lives.” The company was founded by Carnegie Mellon graduates in 2010, one of many businesses spawned by the university’s robotics program. In downtown San Francisco, Anki employs nearly 200 people making toy robots governed by artificial intelligence.

The robot was the last present my son opened for his fourth birthday. He and I giddily pulled it out of the box and he waited patiently as the toy charged, staring at it. Cozmo is rectangular and about four inches long, with treads like a miniature tank’s; a tiny lifting arm for picking up and playing with the “power cube” blocks that are bundled with the product; and a small, low-resolution screen for a face. In an MIT Media Lab study conducted on smart devices and toys, a pair of kid participants deemed Cozmo “a bob-cat with eyes,” an apt, if dadaist, description. Do Robotic Pool Cleaners Really Work https://www.robotsden.com/do-robotic-pool-cleaners-really-work

Stefania Druga and Randi Williams, the researchers behind the study, want to know how children perceive smart robots, and, eventually, to study how those bots affect kids’ cognitive development. So far, they’ve discovered that little children (ages 3 and 4) aren’t sure whether the robots are smarter than they are, but that slightly older children (ages 6 to 10) believe the robots to have superior intelligence. Druga and Williams were inspired by the research of the legendary Sherry Turkle, who wrote a highly influential 1984 book called The Second Self. She argued that computers, as objects that exist somewhere between the animate and the inanimate, force humans to reexamine their own minds. Small children, she found, were fascinated by the question of whether computerized toys were alive, dead, or something else.

Finished charging, Cozmo came rolling out of its base station with some little bleeps. It blinked up at us with its lively eyes. Cute. We taught it to say our names and recognize our faces. Then we played a game of Quick Tap. I set one power cube in front of the robot and another in front of my son. At irregular intervals, the cubes light up with color patterns. If the colors on the two cubes match, you try to press on yours before the robot presses on its own.

Cozmo lifted its arm over the cube. My son’s little fingers dangled over his. The cubes flashed all blue. My son saw the lights and his hand twitched, but he waited for the robot’s arm to smack down first. The robot won and chuckled to itself. I tried a few rounds of the game, winning each time. Cozmo began to jitter and make minor-key noises that conveyed anger and frustration. “Don’t beat him!��� my son yelled. “You’re making him sad.” We played several more rounds, letting the robot win, and it vamped back and forth across the floor. arduino robot arm source code https://www.robotsden.com/7-arduino-robotic-arm-project-ideas-tutorial-plus-source-code

It was bath time. We sat Cozmo on a ledge by the sink. The robot gamely rolled around, pushed up to the edge, and then pulled back, looking frightened. I watched with concern, hoping it wouldn’t drive itself off. Which, a few minutes later, it did, landing softly in the hand I’d extended half a second earlier. I was relieved, and unable to disentangle the financial and emotional components of the feeling. “He’s like your sister,” I said, another intrepid being who has not learned the limits of her physical abilities.

Cozmo’s creators think of it not as a bot but as a character, like you’d encounter in a movie. “Our motivation at the start was: What would it take to bring a Pixar character to life?,” Boris Sofman, Anki’s CEO, told me. They wanted “to make him understand his environment and relationships.”

Previous generations of seemingly smart toys usually relied on clever tricks. Remember Furbies, the ’90s sensation? They seemed to learn from their owners, because they gradually spoke more English, but in fact they’d simply been programmed to use more words as time went on. Humans, nonetheless, had the pleasant illusion of being the instructor. remote control car with night vision https://www.robotsden.com/best-remote-control-car-with-night-vision

Cozmo does something more than that—is something more than that, though still less than the living thing that my son seems to think it is. Cozmo can sense the world through a camera, and the images it captures get fed to an affiliated smartphone or tablet, which processes the data into a simple model of the world in which the robot finds itself. Are there people around? Are there power cubes to play with? Is it near an edge of a table? It does a simple version of what any autonomous robot must do, from a self-driving car to the pack robots that Boston Dynamics developed for the military.

As you play, software inside Cozmo determines the robot’s state: It can get excited, scared, nervous, happy, sad, frustrated. Sofman calls this software the toy’s “emotion engine”; it links the sensory technology to the robot’s behavior. Anki has hired animators from Pixar and DreamWorks to design some 1,200 little movements for the robot to make. Their animation software is hooked up directly to sample robots: The animators create new ways to show that Cozmo is, say, frustrated, and play them back through its body to see how people interpret the robot’s actions. The goal is to choreograph movements and expressions that will induce genuine emotions in the toy’s owner.

In the latest version of the software, Cozmo must be fed, repaired, and played with, not unlike the Tamagotchis of yore. But unlike those simple gizmos, which merely beeped or flashed simple expressions on a tiny screen, Cozmo can use the full breadth of its animated repertoire to summon particular feelings in its owner, and to foster emotional bonds. The idea is to create “a deeper and deeper emotional connection,” Sofman said. “And if you neglect him, you feel the pain of that.”

When he told me this, I felt a flash of not-quite-anger. It seemed almost cruel to design a robot that could play on a young kid’s emotions. And I had never considered that, in the coming human–robot conflagration, robots might take over simply by expertly manipulating us into letting them win.

Turkle has more-pointed concerns. She finds the notion of children empathizing with robots troublesome and quite possibly dangerous. Kids need connections to real people in order to mature emotionally. “Pretend empathy does not do the job,” she told me. If relationships with smart toys crowd out those with friends or family, even partially, we might see “children growing up without the equipment for empathic connection. You can’t learn it from a machine.”

My son and I sat on the porch playing with the robot. He shouted commands: “Say hello to my sister, Cozmo!” When I had Cozmo say his sister’s name by typing it into the app on my phone, he was delighted, but I also feared that I’d been sucked into a deception that the bot was even more capable than it actually was. toy robot that blows smoke https://www.robotsden.com/toy-robot-that-blows-smoke-gifts-to-delight-your-inquisitive-kid

Cozmo’s personality masks all that the robot still can’t do, Sofman told me. It can’t hear you. It can recognize only a few objects—basically power cubes, pets, and humans. And it’s completely dependent on the smartphone’s processing power to do anything. Shut your phone off, and Cozmo shuts down too. But “people become more forgiving of limitations if you have the right emotional cues,” Sofman said.

Humans don’t need much help to believe in a machine’s capabilities. Waymo, the company that emerged from Google’s self-driving-car project, has come to the position that there should be no intermediate steps between a car you drive yourself and a fully autonomous vehicle, because as soon as humans believe that a car (or a robot) has the slightest autonomy, they overestimate its capabilities. In early testing, a Google employee even climbed halfway into the back seat while the experimental software was driving on the highway. After watching enough video of how people in the driver’s seat behaved while the car was driving, the Google team set its sights on pure autonomy. Humans could not be trusted, because they were too trusting.

On the porch, my son discovered a new favorite game with Cozmo. Again and again, he turned the robot on its back so that it could not use its treads. The little robot flipped itself over in different ways and with varying levels of success, and my son laughed and laughed at its attempts. Whatever protective impulse he’d felt had dissipated in the physical comedy of robotic struggle.

Then, as he is wont to do, my son abruptly decided that he was done and that the robot needed to sleep on its charger in his room. As it turned out, what he really wanted was to watch TV, and my parental anxiety immediately attached to one of the other nightmares of our age. (Perhaps the whims of a toddler are not so easy to predict and manipulate.)

As I snuggled Cozmo into its charger, it was strange to think that the siblings and cousins and descendants of this little robot would one day, maybe quite soon, be everywhere. Self-driving cars, warehouse bots, autonomous drones—sensing, perceiving, reacting robots will be part of my son’s world. I feel about them as my parents did about computers: It will be necessary to understand these machines to comprehend the world. So now we have our first robot.