Is robotics all just a big hype? I would like to say yes, and no. This is a temporary recycle of an older post I wrote last December covering a topic I wanted to discuss at last night’s Cafe Scientifique. How is medical robotics affecting the society? A discussion of cost vs. benefits, how more people are choosing robotic surgeries, and how some are more disappointed afterwards.

For those of you who don’t know the Andersons in the roboethics world, please meet them via the video here.

Susan Anderson and Michael Anderson are a philosopher and a computer scientist (yes, they’re a couple) who has been working together to promote ethics using AI approach for years – they’ve been involved in the field of machine ethics which is a broader field than roboethics. Susan Anderson is a professor at the University of Conneticut and Michael Anderson is an associate professor at the University of Hartford.  Just by skimming …

I found a very good coverage on robots and issues involved with the current state of the art  technology.
PBS NewsHour’s correspondent Miles O’Brien reports:

The full transcript of the coverage is available here.

We, the homo-sapiens, constantly seek challenges and wow the world. Yuna Kim’s perfect figure skating performance at the Vancouver Winter Olympics  (2010) would be my favorite example of this, but then again, we met the challenge of sending men to the Moon, and also fly thousands of people (who don’t have wings hidden in their backs) across the oceans everyday. But it seems to me that we’re increasingly competing with machines these days, and somehow proving that perfectness achieved by machines aren’t really perfect enough in real life – because humans can do …

The New Scientist, The Daily Maverick (South Africa) and other media covered a roboethics related story this Friday by introducing Borut Povše and colleagues’ recent work presented at the IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics. The conference was held last week (October 10-13th, 2010) in Istanbul, Turkey and was a venue where over 900 papers on the topic were presented.
Borut Povše and colleagues’ work are getting a lot of attention because of the nature of the experiment they conducted. What did they do? They did a study where
“a powerful robot …