Mr. Future

Mr. Future’s secret identity revealed!

As part of my ( beloved ) day job, I invent electronic toys for Atomocom.  We just had a bang-up great Toy Fair ‘08 showing, and to make a good week even better, New York Magazine just ran a small Toy Fair aftermath/artifact blurb on yours truly. 

( Now back to our regularly scheduled future-centric programming. )

Link

Paul Merton interviews Mr Wu, a farmer who makes brilliant “robots out of rubbish.” Everything from vintage style tin walkers to a man-sized ridable robot rickshaw that talks.

The best part of the segment comes from the inventor’s wife, Mrs Wu. Speaking after one of Mr Wu’s robots recently burned the family home to ground, “Other people’s husbands, they are busy making money, or looking after the wife and children,” she complains. ” The only thing on his mind is making robots.”

Video Link and China Daily Link (via William Gibson’s blog.)

Brooks, professor of robotics at MIT, director of CSAIL and co-founder and CTO of iRobot, is interviewed about a variety of trends in modern robotics. From the differences in US and Japanese views on robotics, attitudes on autonomy, and robots in combat to wheeled vs. bipedal.

From the CNET article:

“What do you say about this dichotomy between the high expectations that have been raised by fiction and the reality of consumer robotics?
Brooks: Well, at least we got part of the way. If it wasn’t for the Roomba, we wouldn’t be there at all and we’d be really disappointed. You may notice you don’t have a flying car either.

I think everyone misjudged how some things work, and I normally talk about it in terms of the founders of artificial intelligence, who just had their 50th anniversary last year for 1956. In 1966, they set a summer project to solve the vision problem and they put an undergraduate in charge of it…”