as time goes by

Is the future what it used to be? Is there in fact, a power, a destiny, a divinity of some kind that “shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will”? The opinion of the majority has always been that there is: “that time marches on” to a future unalterable by human planning, and that the reasonable thing for us all to do is to put ourselves in accord with what some call “God’s will” and others the “way of nature”; with what in England was known as “weird,” and in Greece and Rome was personified by the Fates. “The fates,” wrote Seneca, “lead him who will; him who won’t, they drag.”…

M.W. Thring, “A Robot in the House” (1967): …In other words, we either raise our standard of living above that necessary for comfort and happiness or we leave it at this level and work shorter hours. I shall take it for granted that mankind has, by that time, chosen the latter alternative. Men will be working shorter and shorter hours in their paid employment. It follows that the housewife will also expect to be able to have more leisure in her life without lowering her standard of living. It also follows that human domestic servants will have completely ceased to exist. Yet the great majority of the housewives will wish to be relieved completely from the routine operations of the home such as scrubbing the floors or the bath of the cooker, or washing the clothes or washing up, or dusting or sweeping, or making beds….

—If you’re a chef, musician, cleaner, model, or just anyone, you should be afraid. Very afraid. You’re about to lose your job – and when robots rule the employment roost, don’t be surprised if you end up losing your life too…
Note: the following is pure speculation and may be an example of mass hysteria mongering.—Read More:http://www.businesspundit.com/8-insane-japanese-robots-that-will-take-your-job-and-possibly-your-life/

…By far the most logical step to relieve the housewife of routine, is to provide a robot slave which can be trained to the requirements of a particular home and can be programmed to carry out half a dozen or more standard operations(for example, scrubbing, sweeping and dusting washing up, laying tables, making beds),when so switched by the housewife. It will be a machine having no more emotions than a car, but having a memory for instructions and a limited degree of instructed or built-in adaptability according to the positions in which it finds various types of objects.It will operate other more specialized machines, for example, the vacuum cleaners or clothes washing machine….

—The world’s first concept for a powered exoskeleton ? We often forget that even the now bygone era of Steam power and locomotion was new and in its infancy, satirists looked at a future whereby the most absurd objects could be powered and animated.
Locomotion – Walking by Steam, Riding by Steam, Flying by Steam, by Robert Seymour published by Thomas McLean, London . —Read More:http://cyberneticzoo.com/?tag=shortshanks

…There are no problems in the production of such a domestic robot to which we do not have already the glimmering of a solution. When I have discussed this kind of device with housewives, some 90 per cent of them have the immediate reaction, ‘ How soon can I buy one?’ The other l0 per cent have the reaction, ‘ I would be terrified to have it moving about my house ‘– but when one explains to them that it could be switched off or unplugged or stopped without the slightest difficulty, or made to go and put itself away in a cupboard at any time, they quickly realize that it is a highly desirable object. In my own home we have found that, at first, the washing-up machine was regarded as a rival to the worker at the kitchen sink, but now there is no greater pleasure than to go to bed in the evening and know that the washing up is being done downstairs after one is asleep. Read More:http://eng.hzu.edu.cn/n169c15.shtml

The thought of Seneca gains force today as we continue to vault headlong into the twenty-first century and deal with the legacy of the late twentieth century, that century that once seemed to hold for humankind such promise, but instead gave us overpopulation, pollution, social chaos and the threat of nuclear war, wring optimism into a disconcerting sense of a future of disaster. Now, technological unemployment, so evidently articulated by economists as far back as the the 1970’s seem coming home to roost leading to a collision of circular and linear thinking…

—Our domestic service robot Dynamaid was constructed for the RoboCup 2009 @Home competition, which took place in Graz. Dynamaid has an eight-wheeled omnidirectional base (12 DOF), a movable trunk (2 DOF), two anthropomorphic arms (7 DOF each), and a movable sensor head (2 DOF). Together with Robotinho, Dynamaid won the innovation award. Our team Nimbro@Home came in third in the overall ranking. We also reached the second place in the @Home league of RoboCup German Open. —Read More:http://www.nimbro.net/robots.html