Because in the future, our descendants will want to figure out when the tipping point happened where Robots went from harmless playthings to — well — our new masters, we present our Robots Roundup, an occasional look at robot news.

• Robot Nurses Close to Being a Reality - Because going to the hosiptal isn’t dehumanizing enough, your nurse is soon going to be a robot. Your nursebot will be able to take your temperature remotely as well as give you your medicine. They will also frighten small children who didn’t want to visit you in the first place. Ironically, the one thing that you’d really want a robot to do — changing your bedpan — doesn’t seem to be among the list of functions.
• Japanese toy firms look to adults, dancing robots - This isn’t demeaning at all: a 6.5″ dancing robot called the “i-SOBOT.” Billed as the world’s smallest robot — totally offending gazillions of nanobots — it’s small enough to fit in a lunchbox, from where the manufacturer assumes that the young men who are the target audience will produce it to amaze and amuse their friends. In other words, this is supposed to be something that Hiro would have annoyed Ando with prior to discovering his power. Given the size and purported dancing ability, it’s entirely possible that they are targeting the wrong gender.
• Killer robots move from sci-fi to DMV - I was all set to make a joke about the fact that killer robots at the DMV would be an upgrade — especially here in California — but it turns out that the headline is a typo, and those killer robots are actually being deployed in the DMZ between South and North Korea. Which is totally different, and sets up a conflict between Azimov’s Laws and the fact that it would be pretty cook for killer robots to stalk Kim Jong Il.
• Kamikaze Space Robots Save the Earth - Now this is a movie that I’d go see: Kamikaze Robots vs. Killer Asteroids. Of course, what would happen if the robots became self-aware halfway through and started debating the nature of their free will and whether or not they should sacrifice themselves for the good of the humans who built them for this mission in the first place?

• Robot parking garage to open in New York - And finally this month, New Yorkers, who don’t really drive anyway, are getting their own robotic valets. However, there have been problems with other robotic garages: they’ve been rebelling, damaging and dropping cars. Oops. However, notice that the car in the promo picture is a BMV SUV, as if to say “Hey, if the people who own BMW SUVs trust robots to part their car, then you should have no problems with it.” Of course, the only people rich enough to own BMW SUV’s are the people who own parking garages, so that just rings a bit false.

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