/ News
To Avoid Your Family, Rent a Robotic Replacement
Robots aren't quite ready to to kick down your front door and drag you into machine slavery, but they can help you avoid your family. A Japanese firm today announced plans to rent telepresence robots in a bid to make them available to a wider market.
NEC said it will rental plans for its PaPeRo robot will run as low as less than ¥10,000 per month, which is currently around $100. For that price, the 10 inch, three pound robot will sit around your parent's house, using its camera, speakers, and facial recognition system to help take your place at home and connect you to people via a conduit that's more intuitive to interaction than simply living Skype running on a laptop on your coffee table.
The main goal appears to be bringing bringing telepresence to the consumer market, and allow people to better connect with each other via robot avatars. The program will first be limited to Japan when it starts early next year, but the company expects to expand worldwide. In its announcement of the partner program, NEC said it's looking for business partners to develop applications for the bot using NEC's API and Cloud Federated robot platform.
According to a Kyodo report, "the robot can also be applied to such purposes as managing family members’ schedules as well as detecting suspicious individuals when family members are away from home." No word on whether or not the bot can defend against said suspicious individuals. but its soulless eyes are probably enough to deter any potential intruders.
Strangely enough if the personal robotics world, PaPeRo dates back to the last millennium. It was first introduced in 1999, and has had multiple iterations in the years since, including one aimed at childcare. The rental program uses PaPeRo Mini, a smaller version introduced a few years ago. The PaPeRo bots—which, by the way, stand for "Partner Type Personal Robot" if you were wondering—have thus been making occasional headlines for well more than a decade.
Their popularity hasn't really taken off during all that time, but NEC's latest effort to get cheaper bots into homes, hospitals, and stores may find legs. Only in the past couple years havetelepresence robots really taken off, with growing popularity in schools and hospitals. The only problem is that they remain expensive—the VGo models that have found a foothold in American schools cost around $6,000 a piece, with up to $1,200 in yearly maintenance costs.
While PaPeRo isn't as mobile as the VGo bot, a rental price of around $100 a month is much easier to deal with, especially for someone looking to make sure they can easily connect with their grandma without having to play phone tag. NEC hopes that a cheaper entry price and more app development can get its baby robot into more homes, which does make sense. But let's be real: Is talking to a little plastic blob really that much more immersive than talking on a phone?
Source: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/to-avoid-your-family-rent-a-robotic-replacement
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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