Post by anansi on Jul 13, 2010 2:30:18 GMT -5
Robot Bina48 gets interviewed by the New York Times
by Mark R - on July 12th, 2010
When I first saw this picture, I thought it was a female version of Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite, but with a blond wig. It is actually a robot.
Needless to say, it could “make your wildest dreams come true” about sentient robots. This is Bina48, a robot that is not at MIT or some major university, but the Terasem Movement Foundation in some small town in Bristol, Vermont.
I have included a video of the interview after the jump so you can see the “Interview with a Robot” for yourself. As you might have guessed, Bina48 did not understand some of the questions.
In fact, when the reporter mentioned “cool”, Bina 48 thought that she was referring to the weather or sickness. Robot misunderstandings like that are fodder for really bad science fiction.
As for Bina48’s appearance, that is modeled after Bina (Martine) Rothblatt, and she apparently spent a lot of time with this project. The robot’s “mental programming” is derived from her, and Bina48 seems to want to know more of the human Bina.
Okay, do we want to speculate where this is going? Do I even need to give you the whole: “should we make robots more human” essay? All I can tell you is that Bina48 could be the breakthrough that we have been waiting for, because it certainly is more advanced then a chatbot.
[youtube]Robot Bina48 gets interviewed by the New York Times
by Mark R - on July 12th, 2010
When I first saw this picture, I thought it was a female version of Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite, but with a blond wig. It is actually a robot.
Needless to say, it could “make your wildest dreams come true” about sentient robots. This is Bina48, a robot that is not at MIT or some major university, but the Terasem Movement Foundation in some small town in Bristol, Vermont.
I have included a video of the interview after the jump so you can see the “Interview with a Robot” for yourself. As you might have guessed, Bina48 did not understand some of the questions.
In fact, when the reporter mentioned “cool”, Bina 48 thought that she was referring to the weather or sickness. Robot misunderstandings like that are fodder for really bad science fiction.
As for Bina48’s appearance, that is modeled after Bina (Martine) Rothblatt, and she apparently spent a lot of time with this project. The robot’s “mental programming” is derived from her, and Bina48 seems to want to know more of the human Bina.
Okay, do we want to speculate where this is going? Do I even need to give you the whole: “should we make robots more human” essay? All I can tell you is that Bina48 could be the breakthrough that we have been waiting for, because it certainly is more advanced then a chatbot.
www.coolest-gadgets.com/20100712/robot-bina48-interviewed-york-times/
Bina the Person
Rothblatt was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Southern California, first in San Diego and later in Los Angeles. Her father, Harold David Rothblatt, was a dentist for the Retail Clerks Union, and was the youngest son of the Chicago leatherworkers labor organizer Isadore Rothblatt. Her mother, Rosa Lee Bernstein, was a toastmistress and speech therapist at San Diego State College. Rothblatt's paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States around 1910 from Odessa, Russia. Her maternal grandparents immigrated around the same timeframe from Poland. She left college after two years and travelled throughout Europe, Turkey, Iran, Kenya and the Seychelles. It was at the NASA tracking station in the Seychelles, during the summer of 1974, that she had her epiphany to unite the world via satellite communications. She then returned to UCLA, graduating summa cum laude in communication studies with a thesis on international direct broadcast satellites.
As an undergraduate she became a convert to Gerard K. O'Neill's "High Frontier" plan for space colonization after analyzing his 1975 Physics Today cover story on the concept as a project for Professor Harland Epps' Topics in Modern Astronomy seminar. Rothblatt subsequently became an active member of the L-5 Society and its Southern California affiliate, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Space Industrialization and Settlement). During her four year law-MBA program, also at UCLA, she published five articles on the law of satellite communications and prepared a business plan for the Hughes Space and Communications Group titled PanAmSat about how satellite spot beam technology could be used to provide communication service to multiple Latin American countries. She also became a regular contributor on legal aspects of space colonization to the OASIS newsletter.
Upon graduation in 1981 Rothblatt was hired by the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling to represent the television broadcasting industry before the Federal Communications Commission in the areas of direct broadcast satellites and spread spectrum communication. In 1982 she left to study astronomy at the University of Maryland, but was soon retained by NASA to obtain FCC approval for the IEEE c-band system on its tracking and data relay satellites and by the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Radio Frequencies to safeguard before the FCC radio astronomy quiet bands used for deep space research. Later that year she was also retained by Gerard K. O'Neill to handle business and regulatory matters for his newly invented satellite navigation technology, known as the Geostar System. In 1984 she was retained by Rene Anselmo, founder of Spanish International Network, to implement her PanAmSat MBA thesis as a new company that would compete with the global telecommunications satellite monopoly, Intelsat. In 1986 she discontinued her astronomy studies and consulting work to become the full-time CEO of Geostar Corporation, under William E. Simon as Chairman. She left Geostar in 1990 to create both WorldSpace and Sirius Satellite Radio. She left these companies in 1997 to become the full-time Chairman and CEO of United Therapeutics Corporation.
Rothblatt is responsible for launching several communications satellite companies, including the first nationwide vehicle location system (Geostar, 1983), the first private international spacecom project (PanAmSat, 1984), the first global satellite radio network (WorldSpace, 1990), and the first non-geostationary satellite-to-car broadcasting system (Sirius Satellite Radio, 1990).
As an attorney-entrepreneur, Rothblatt was also responsible for leading the efforts to obtain worldwide approval, via new international treaties, of satellite orbit/spectrum allocations for space-based navigation services (1987) and for direct-to-person satellite radio transmissions (1992).
She also lead the International Bar Association's biopolitical project to develop a draft Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights for the United Nations (whose final version was adopted by the UNESCO on 11 November 1997, and endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1998).
Personal life
In 1982, Martin Rothblatt married Bina Aspen, an African American woman. The two of them have four children (from oldest to second youngest) Eli, Sunee, Gabriel, and Jenesis. In 1994, Rothblatt, a male-to-female transsexual, underwent sex reassignment surgery and changed her name to Martine Aliana Rothblatt. She has since become a vocal advocate of transgenderism.[2]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martine_Rothblatt
How is that for Gender bending/Android human??..it is going to be a brave and yet scary new world.
by Mark R - on July 12th, 2010
When I first saw this picture, I thought it was a female version of Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite, but with a blond wig. It is actually a robot.
Needless to say, it could “make your wildest dreams come true” about sentient robots. This is Bina48, a robot that is not at MIT or some major university, but the Terasem Movement Foundation in some small town in Bristol, Vermont.
I have included a video of the interview after the jump so you can see the “Interview with a Robot” for yourself. As you might have guessed, Bina48 did not understand some of the questions.
In fact, when the reporter mentioned “cool”, Bina 48 thought that she was referring to the weather or sickness. Robot misunderstandings like that are fodder for really bad science fiction.
As for Bina48’s appearance, that is modeled after Bina (Martine) Rothblatt, and she apparently spent a lot of time with this project. The robot’s “mental programming” is derived from her, and Bina48 seems to want to know more of the human Bina.
Okay, do we want to speculate where this is going? Do I even need to give you the whole: “should we make robots more human” essay? All I can tell you is that Bina48 could be the breakthrough that we have been waiting for, because it certainly is more advanced then a chatbot.
[youtube]Robot Bina48 gets interviewed by the New York Times
by Mark R - on July 12th, 2010
When I first saw this picture, I thought it was a female version of Pedro from Napoleon Dynamite, but with a blond wig. It is actually a robot.
Needless to say, it could “make your wildest dreams come true” about sentient robots. This is Bina48, a robot that is not at MIT or some major university, but the Terasem Movement Foundation in some small town in Bristol, Vermont.
I have included a video of the interview after the jump so you can see the “Interview with a Robot” for yourself. As you might have guessed, Bina48 did not understand some of the questions.
In fact, when the reporter mentioned “cool”, Bina 48 thought that she was referring to the weather or sickness. Robot misunderstandings like that are fodder for really bad science fiction.
As for Bina48’s appearance, that is modeled after Bina (Martine) Rothblatt, and she apparently spent a lot of time with this project. The robot’s “mental programming” is derived from her, and Bina48 seems to want to know more of the human Bina.
Okay, do we want to speculate where this is going? Do I even need to give you the whole: “should we make robots more human” essay? All I can tell you is that Bina48 could be the breakthrough that we have been waiting for, because it certainly is more advanced then a chatbot.
www.coolest-gadgets.com/20100712/robot-bina48-interviewed-york-times/
Bina the Person
Rothblatt was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in Southern California, first in San Diego and later in Los Angeles. Her father, Harold David Rothblatt, was a dentist for the Retail Clerks Union, and was the youngest son of the Chicago leatherworkers labor organizer Isadore Rothblatt. Her mother, Rosa Lee Bernstein, was a toastmistress and speech therapist at San Diego State College. Rothblatt's paternal grandparents immigrated to the United States around 1910 from Odessa, Russia. Her maternal grandparents immigrated around the same timeframe from Poland. She left college after two years and travelled throughout Europe, Turkey, Iran, Kenya and the Seychelles. It was at the NASA tracking station in the Seychelles, during the summer of 1974, that she had her epiphany to unite the world via satellite communications. She then returned to UCLA, graduating summa cum laude in communication studies with a thesis on international direct broadcast satellites.
As an undergraduate she became a convert to Gerard K. O'Neill's "High Frontier" plan for space colonization after analyzing his 1975 Physics Today cover story on the concept as a project for Professor Harland Epps' Topics in Modern Astronomy seminar. Rothblatt subsequently became an active member of the L-5 Society and its Southern California affiliate, OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Space Industrialization and Settlement). During her four year law-MBA program, also at UCLA, she published five articles on the law of satellite communications and prepared a business plan for the Hughes Space and Communications Group titled PanAmSat about how satellite spot beam technology could be used to provide communication service to multiple Latin American countries. She also became a regular contributor on legal aspects of space colonization to the OASIS newsletter.
Upon graduation in 1981 Rothblatt was hired by the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling to represent the television broadcasting industry before the Federal Communications Commission in the areas of direct broadcast satellites and spread spectrum communication. In 1982 she left to study astronomy at the University of Maryland, but was soon retained by NASA to obtain FCC approval for the IEEE c-band system on its tracking and data relay satellites and by the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Radio Frequencies to safeguard before the FCC radio astronomy quiet bands used for deep space research. Later that year she was also retained by Gerard K. O'Neill to handle business and regulatory matters for his newly invented satellite navigation technology, known as the Geostar System. In 1984 she was retained by Rene Anselmo, founder of Spanish International Network, to implement her PanAmSat MBA thesis as a new company that would compete with the global telecommunications satellite monopoly, Intelsat. In 1986 she discontinued her astronomy studies and consulting work to become the full-time CEO of Geostar Corporation, under William E. Simon as Chairman. She left Geostar in 1990 to create both WorldSpace and Sirius Satellite Radio. She left these companies in 1997 to become the full-time Chairman and CEO of United Therapeutics Corporation.
Rothblatt is responsible for launching several communications satellite companies, including the first nationwide vehicle location system (Geostar, 1983), the first private international spacecom project (PanAmSat, 1984), the first global satellite radio network (WorldSpace, 1990), and the first non-geostationary satellite-to-car broadcasting system (Sirius Satellite Radio, 1990).
As an attorney-entrepreneur, Rothblatt was also responsible for leading the efforts to obtain worldwide approval, via new international treaties, of satellite orbit/spectrum allocations for space-based navigation services (1987) and for direct-to-person satellite radio transmissions (1992).
She also lead the International Bar Association's biopolitical project to develop a draft Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights for the United Nations (whose final version was adopted by the UNESCO on 11 November 1997, and endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1998).
Personal life
In 1982, Martin Rothblatt married Bina Aspen, an African American woman. The two of them have four children (from oldest to second youngest) Eli, Sunee, Gabriel, and Jenesis. In 1994, Rothblatt, a male-to-female transsexual, underwent sex reassignment surgery and changed her name to Martine Aliana Rothblatt. She has since become a vocal advocate of transgenderism.[2]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martine_Rothblatt
How is that for Gender bending/Android human??..it is going to be a brave and yet scary new world.
