Nu Vibez and Roleplay Guide Magazine - January 2014 | Page 70

From Masters to Minions - p2

le and right. Yet, according to one expert
there is another, poten ally more concerning
reason that Google has gone into the robo cs
business; while Google's previous acquisi ons
were companies that made bits and parts of
robots, the recent Boston Dynamics deal
makes it clear that Google's true ambi on is
human-like robots interac ng with ordinary
people.
“The only reason to buy this company is to
make complete androids, systems that can
walk around on our sidewalks and right up to
our homes," says Illah Nourbakhsh, a professor
at Carnegie Mellon University and author of
the book Robot Futures. Such bots could be
incredibly helpful, but also incredibly invasive
as they have the ability to send data and
pictures back to Google.
Google has acquired eight companies in six
months but what makes the purchase of
Boston Dynamics significant is that they are
making incredibly mobile full scale robots with
func ons that make them highly interac ve
with humans. Can anybody say “iRobot?”
“With constant connec ons to computer
servers over the Internet, the robots will be
able to act as two-way connec ons between
the digital and physical worlds. Such robots will
get cues on how to behave with knowledge of a
person's preferences as collected by Google
and, at the same me, send data back to
Google of observa ons in the real world,”
reported Aaron Pressman from Yahoo Finance.
Reams of data are also the key to Google's selfdriving cars. Building robo c cars that navigate
only by analyzing their surroundings in real
me would be extremely difficult. But giving
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