Who wants a ROBO-BUTLER? Google and pals do – and they've just put $2m towards it

Cool

Robot butlers down, now where is my bloody flying car, dammit?

Bots ahoy!

Boy, if you thought that denial of service attack bots on the Internet were a problem, you ain't seen nothing yet.

The recent security breach of ... um ... the whole world should make you a bit worried. Will they allocate budget to put in some sort of working hack-proof safety mechanisms? You bet! It will be too small and they will be giving it to 'CrossYerFingersCo' security systems (division of Diebold).

The current melt-down of the Internet's SSL infrastructure happened on our 'state of the art' systems. Clearly the state of the art is not what it should be.

I have no idea what may or may not be under non-disclosure, but let me just say that IBM, for instance, has had much more solid security stuff since at least the 1980s. It is not that ways to secure things are unknown.

In fairness, until fairly recent times our systems had such limited capabilities that getting them working at all was something of a trick. Most of our current infrastructure was never designed to be secure. It was designed to be 'open' and easy to use. Clearly, in the 21st Century when we are about to send semi-autonomous network attached robots out into the physical world we need to be a bit more fastidious about securing our systems.

Murder or innocent software bug? No way to tell. The robot claims it's innocent and the other robots circling menacingly about suggest we take that as our final answer...

I already have a services robot - it vacuums my floor.

Its pretty shit at it, although maybe if I paint a face on it it'll make it more tolerable

I welcome our mechanical subservient overlords.

It should be interesting to see what happens as more and more jobs that have usually thought to be safe from mechanical automation are lost (this, self driving vehicles, etc). I think sooner or later, there will need to be some serious rethink on the common economic models that are currently worshiped.

I am reminded of the old joke of a car factory manager and union rep walking through the car plant. The factory manager is proudly showing union rep all the robotics being used to build cars and says to him, "I bet you are wondering how you are going to get them to join the union" to which the union rep replies, "actually, I was wondering how you are going to get them to buy cars."

Hospital services

Getting the UI right will be useful.

"Nurse bedpan! Nurse bedpan!"

"Sir, I am patient service attendant Dee Seven Zero, my name/designation is not bedpan. How can I help you sir?"

" Naah! forget it! It's too late!"