The Great Geek Manual

Also known as: Ten steps to a Skynet-dominated Future!

Let’s face it. Humans are stupid. Robot domination is inevitable. Despite Hollywood’s repeated warnings, we continue to invent and advance the very technology that will eventually enslave us.

10. Shake-U-Tron: We’ve got Skynet by the balls? That’s what John Connors thinks. It’s true, the Shake-U-Tron isn’t high up on evolutionary ladder of killer robots, but it is officially the last place in the world I want to be standing when the robot revolution begins!

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09. Exploding Power Cells: This is where is all came together for me. Sure. We can pretend that we are building robots for our own benefit. We can pretend that the eerie similarities in the features we are inventing and Hollywood’s ominous foretellings are all just coincidences. But batteries exploding? That’s no coincidence my friends. That’s a sign of the end times – proof positive that we are in fact on the road to a Skynet-dominated future! The smart ones will begin hording beef jerky and migrating to the polar caps now, while there’s still time.

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08. Organic Fuel: So where will the robots find the energy required to stage a global revolution? Well, a scientist at University of the West of England has taken care of that small problem. The deceptively-cute “Ecobot” is a robot which supposedly uses dead flies as fuel. In all actuality, the robot could fuel itself with any decaying flesh, since what it requires is the sugars produced as a by-product of the microbes it stores in its digestive system. During the robot revolution, the dead will desecrated in droves, as the living will flea in terror!

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07. Perceiving humans as bacon: If you thought that being strapped into the Matrix so that the robots could use your brain for a processor and your body as a power source was going to be a living hell, we’ve got news for you. Those geniuses at NEC System technologies and Mie University have designed an absurdly cute little guy robot dubbed “the gastronomist”, the world’s first robot with a sense of taste. And here’s the kicker – these madmen have programmed the robots to perceive humans as bacon! As if the robots needed another reason to wage war against their delicious, fleshy creators! I foresee the robot revolution beginning with a Pac-Man style slaughter in the streets of our cities.

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06. Shapeshifting Robots: Once you’re given robots a taste for human flesh, it’s only natural to give them the best camouflage money can buy. After all, man is the most dangerous game. To that end Haruhisa Kurokawa of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan has invented the very first step on the road to the T-100, the ATRON. That’s right. First Godzilla and now murderous building blocks – what will Japan give us next?

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05. Robots with Nanotech Swarms: The robot is called the “TETwalker.” It’s a durable tetrahedral frame with electric motors located at the corners for mobility. Most notable among its many features is the swarm of ant-like nanobots at its command. This nanoswarm allows it to adapt itself to such unfamiliar terrains as the surface of Mars … or the year 2003. Yes, we’re all thinking it. Here is the first ancestor of the T-X (or Terminatrix).

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04. Fireproofing Robots: Sending robots into burning buildings to rescue children? Are you shitting me?! Let those children die, or uncounted millions will suffer in their place! Are you not paying attention? The ability to withstand fire is essential to the Terminator’s reign of terror. Nothing so dispirits human prey as a six foot tall gleaming metal robot casually steping out of a flaming wreck like Pepé Le Pew rounding a corner! And yet, roboticists round the globe are still working towards this very goal!

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03. Titanium-welding Robots: You know what I thought the first time I saw Terminator? I thought, “That could never happen! How could a computer possibly build the equipment necessary to assemble sophisticated machines, with only gun-toting sentinels to start with? Then, I read about a new line of automated titanium-welding systems! What was the Terminator made of again? Oh, yeah. Titanium! Hey here’s an idea: let’s create automated robots to assemble titanium military vehicles! Why don’t we just all line up and throw ourselves into the assembly lines, to save the robots the time it would take to assemble the Terminator chasies? Because that’s the only way I can image to make the coming revolution any more convenient for the robots.

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02. Robots that Can Sense Damage, Compensate: As if making robots fireproof and impervious to bullets wasn’t dangerous enough, Hod Lipson (Yes, I said Hod. Frighteningly close to Zod, in my opinion.), a mechanical engineer over at Cornell University has decided to create spider-like automatons that can continue their dreaded march of doom despite loosing multiple limbs. It may just be me, but old Hod seems to have drawn some inspiration from Stargate: SG1’s Replicators.

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01. Killer Robots: Samsung’s Techwin SGR-A1 is a robot that can autonomously track humans visually and then fire an automatic weapon at them. There are plans to deployed the robots along the DMZ between North and South Korea in 2007, replacing 650,000 South Korean troops. I don’t even know what to say to this one, except … WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU ALLOW A DISCOUNT ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURER TO UNLEASH DEADLY ROBOTS IN YOUR NATION?!! I had a Samsung DVD player once that broke down just two weeks after Christmas. It wouldn’t stop trying to eject the disk. When I called the support line, they told me the player was under warranty and all I had to do was mail it back to them. Good luck convincing the robots to climb back into their boxes!

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“Top Ten Worst Ideas in Robotics (aka Ten steps to a Skynet-dominated Future!)” was written by Pipedreamergrey and originally posted to The Great Geek Manual. It may be reposted so long as this notice remains intact. Copyright 2006 Pipedreamergrey.