I personally welcome our new robot masters.

I stumbled across a rather quirky story over at Breitbart.com. The article, titled "Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert," chronicles the use of automated weapons in places such as Iraq as well as the dangers that come along with them. These range from the (slightly) more plausible scenarios, such as terrorist cells capturing the robots and reverse-engineering them, to technological limitations of current artificial intelligence, to the more Isaac Asimov-stylized idea of robo-rebellion.

The "expert" that Breitbart.com consulted was a professor at University of Sheffield in England. He is quoted as saying that "[robots] pose a threat to humanity" at his keynotes. It's somewhat difficult to sound sane when you say that sort of thing in public.

For you robot-lovers (or those wishing to know of the iron-fisted rule of our future cybernetic leaders), the whole article can be read here.

[The above photo is by Dan Coulter of Flickr.com. It is a picture of a band called "Robot Attack!"]

Philadelphia business plans on putting computers in waiting rooms

I was just reading up on the technology beat over at the Philadelphia Inquirer's website and came across this rather interesting story. It would seem that a company called InfoSlates is looking to put tablet PCs into the waiting rooms of hospitals and doctor offices as a high-tech alternative to wrinkled old copies of National Geographic. According to the article, InfoSlate finds that their PCs can be used both as a source of entertainment for those stuck in waiting rooms and also a healthy investment for advertisers. The whole article can be read here.

While the prospect of messing around with a tablet PC while waiting for the doctor to call you in sounds interesting, in a way it feels to me like an invasion. The principle behind InfoSlates' tablets is that they will allow the user to cruise the web and check email, but at the same time the real revenue to InfoSlate will come from the advertisers that invest into the tablets. While cruising the web, InfoSlate could do something as subtle as make the homepage for the tablets an advertiser's site, or they could be more obvious and have small pop-up ads appear. So essentially one of the few places in our modern society where you are not getting bombarded with ads, the waiting room, is now open for solicitation.