I consider myself somewhat of a robot fan, and there are few automatons you could show me that I wouldn’t think are pretty damn cool in some capacity or another. However, there are some robots out there that, no matter how awesome you usually think robots are, are absolutely, seat-wettingly scary. The vast majority of these tend to be humanoid, skirting the phenomenon of the Uncanny Valley with varying degrees of unsettling success. No matter much closer they might bring us to having a completely realistic human robot, there’s simply no excuse for taking some of these android abominations out in public. [Read more…]
The 10 Most Annoying 1980’s Pop Culture Robots
Technology has come a long way from the dark days of the 1980’s when fingerless gloves and slap bracelets weren’t considered hideous forms of fashion expression and dumping your child’s entire college savings into Pogs were a sound investment that’s sure to pay off in the long run. Not only were the robots of the past primitive in terms of their technology and function, but they lacked a serious quality that practically makes them as obsolete as the horse and buggy: a lack of a personality that didn’t want to make humans grab something heavy and smash them until their own motherboards couldn’t recognize them. [Read more…]