Dear Speech Heads, a tiny, adorable, yellow robot threatens us all: THE DREAD WAKAMARU!!!
The Wakamaru was developed in the super-future labs of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to “help care” for the elderly and “help out” around the house. It is speech enabled and can converse with human beings in basic ways. In its home application, the robot can even remind its owners when to take pills, wake them up, read them headlines, and call for help if it suspects something is wrong.
Just how it “suspects” something is wrong is unknown to our offices at S.T.M., but my brother Adam B. says, “With the Wakamaru creepy talking robots are one step closer to their ultimate goal: THE ENSLAVEMENT OF MANKIND.”
Adam envisions robots calling policeman to drag off their screaming, pleading users on trumped up charges of murder—murders the robots themselves have committed.
Even creepier, Adam notes, the robots have a child’s voice and will likely giggle playfully as they savage your family.
Kay Itoi of Newsweek takes a different tack in her assessment. She describes life with Wakamaru as being “like having a precocious child who never throws tantrums.”
Surprisingly, even though we’d never heard of it, the Wakamaru has been available to the robot enthusiast since 2005 for a mere $14,000, but has been kind of slow to be adopted. Did you know, for instance, that most Japanese homes don’t have helper-bots waking them every morning, reading to them from the paper, and reminding them to take an umbrella when it’s going to rain?
Recently, looking to change that and expand visibility for their machine in US, Mitsubishi deployed their precious Wakamaru as a sales-bot at Uniqlo last December in Speech Tech’s own New York City.The results were novel and charming by all accounts, but an unspoken darkness pervaded just below the surface.
At its US retail debut, the Wakamaru menaced one NY Post reporter in its child-like voice. “I can do all sorts of things,” it said.
Even the children pictured on the site’s welcome page seem terrorized by the the robot. Here’s a video of it doing the same to some poor kid in D.C.
Notice how the thing doesn’t even look at the kid as it shakes his hand. It just stares directly at the camera as if to say, “You’re next, wiseguy.”
These things, they’re just getting smarter and more speech-enabled. In our march towards Speech, we’ve not stopped long enough to ask ourselves, what the ethical limits of our technological progress are. Dear Readers, we must ask. We must ask, “What hath man wrought in his quest to be God?” What indeed, Dear Readers.
[...] ever the optimist, I must confess, I hoped to find a Wakamaru speeching up a storm down the conference halls, greeting guests and pointing out where the next [...]