My CNET handler woke me early on Friday.
"It's those corpse-eating robot people," he barked down the phone. "They're after you."
"But I'm not dead yet," I replied. "I just look pretty rough first thing in the morning."
Still, he made me stagger to my laptop and the Robotic Technology site. There, I espied the words: "IMPORTANT MESSAGE CONCERNING EATR."
For those of you who have been asleep since Tuesday, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot, or EATR, is a steam-powered robot being developed for military purposes. Its claim to fame is that it can "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically based energy sources)."
I had noticed that the boffins at Fox News had suggested that this robot would therefore be free to munch on dead bodies. This seems to have been chewed over quite vigorously at Robotic Technology.
Here is what its important message said Friday:
In response to rumors circulating the Internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com, and CNET News about a 'flesh eating' robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets: CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian."
Well, now. I know many folks who tell me they are strictly vegetarian, and then I see them over at In-N-Out Burger sampling more than the lettuce. So please forgive me if my skeptical nerve registers an involuntary fizzing sound.
However, the robotic folk are keen to point out that "desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone, or RTI."
Indeed.
The important message concludes with the words of Harry Schoell, the CEO of Cyclone Power Technologies (The EATR project is a joint venture between Robotic Technology and Cyclone Power Technologies):
"We completely understand the public's concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission. We are focused on demonstrating that our engines can create usable, green power from plentiful, renewable plant matter. The commercial applications alone for this earth-friendly energy solution are enormous."
It is not my mission to be concerned. It just sometimes happens, you know?
In the future, we will need robots to do our dirty work.
In the future, we will need robots to do our clean work, too.
So in the future, we will need our robots to live, like farmers in centuries gone by, off the fat of the land.
One contractor to the Pentagon, Robotic Technology Inc., is already forging ahead with creating foraging robots.
According to its Web site, the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot--or EATR--is "an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling."
We have all resorted to unconventional re-fueling once or twice in our lives. However, I would very much like to use Robotic Technology's precise terminology so as not to affect your edification.
Will Corpse-eating robots really one day be sent out along battlefields?
(Credit: CC Army Mil/Flickr)"The system obtains its energy by foraging--engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating," says the Web site.
Now I am not a scientist, and I'm concerned that the EATR will be steam-powered, but thankfully there are people at Fox News who seem to understand these things.
May I therefore pass on their speculation that this creation will be able to gorge on corpses?
According to Robotic Technology, EATR "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources)".
Ergo, Fox News tells us, it could dine on dead bodies. Our carcasses and those of other animals are, apparently, full of energy.
And given that EATR is being created for some military purposes, there should be plenty of battlefield corpses for it to feed on.
I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a little queasy about this.
When soldiers die on the battlefield, don't their loved ones want their bodies returned to home soil? Is Fox's suggestion, therefore, that EATR will only feed on human roadkill from the road team?
It all seems a little odd to me, but I know there will be many of you out there who will be able to bring some objective and clinical science to this difficult moral area.
Robert Rauschenberg died this year.
Worry not.
For now we have Robot Rauschenberg.
Well, technically speaking (which we try not to here), his name is Viktor.
Just one name, like only the finest artists, Viktor is a drawing and painting machine. He's made from bits taken from other machines, ones that were made for entirely different purposes. (I suppose he will one day describe them as his muses.)
Viktor is really an amalgam of ordinary design software and industrial motors of various kinds.
Instead of drawing graphs for presentations, Viktor creates art for the world. Or, at least, what his creator, Jurg Lehni, a Swiss engineer, believes is art.
(Credit:
Jurg Lehni and Alex Rich)
Jurg, everything is art. Rubbish, unmade beds, you name it.
Yes, but Jurg is deadly serious about this: "We are all being sold proprietary software all the time and being told how to use it in a prescriptive way," he told the London precursor to the New York Times. "But it is possible, if we know how, to bend it to our own will and to use it in a different way. The capacity of this software is not anticipated by us and it often has poetic potential."
If only some great software company had secured the tagline "software with poetic potential", I believe the world would be a far more beautiful place.
And now visitors to London's Institute of Contemporary Art will be able to enjoy Viktor's poetic potential as if they were in the artist's studio.
During the run of A Recent History of Writing and Drawing, Viktor will collaborate with architects, designers, artists, and a shopkeeper, to create moving imagery.
Tuomas Toivonen, a Finnish electronic composer and architect (there are not many Finns who embrace both these disciplines), will play the Hyalonium, a glass electronic harp, while Viktor will blast paint at a black wall behind him.
As for the shopkeeper, well, her name is Leila McAllister and she will be up on stage with two sustainable materials and construction experts- and Viktor- to propose new ways of distributing locally-produced food.
I think you will have to just be there to fully appreciate Leila.
However, perhaps the most stellar night, might turn out to be July 17, when Viktor will debut with Paul Elliman, a graphic designer. Together, they will reinterpret Elliman's recent whispering gallery podcast.
Strangely, it's not so easy to get hold of Viktor's collected works, and the one I display here may or may not be one of his best.
Still, you will surely agree with me that art in action, art that brings the spontaneous joy out of mundane technologies, beats the morbidity of still life or the arbitrary Hammer Horror otherworld of Surrealism any day.
One day, they'll be giving art awards for paintings created using Vista (well, maybe Vista and a Ford Edsel engine), mark my words.
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