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I am RM1972. I am an android designed to patrol and protect my city. 

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I am RM1972. I am an android designed to patrol and protect my city. 

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22-mei-2024 - Ontdek (en bewaar!) je eigen pins op Pinterest.

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I prefer the sounds this band makes compared to other musical compositions.

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This film is fairly accurate to the purpose of my programming.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/328692472811753348/

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Cyberpunk Aesthetic | Cyberpunk aesthetic, Cyberpunk, Robocop

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RoboCop 2 (1990) “ DIRECTIVE 233: RESTRAIN HOSTILE FEELINGS DIRECTIVE 234: PROMOTE POSSITIVE ATTITUDE DIRECTIVE 235: SUPRESS AGGRESSIVENESS DIRECTIVE 236: PROMOTE PRO-SOCIAL VALUES ”

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Amusing.

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My city.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/11329436556410671/

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The sky of Los Angeles 2019 are filled with electronic billboards and flying cars called Spinners. Blade Run… | Blade runner, Blade runner art, Blade runner spinner

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The sky of Los Angeles 2019 are filled with electronic billboards and flying cars called Spinners. Blade Runner 1982

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Maybe this should be a new pastime of mine.

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First Person View POV PC BUILD Guide! (2024)

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No. We do not dream of Electric Sheep.

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (retrospectively titled Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in some later printings) is a 1968 dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth's life has been greatly damaged by a nuclear global war, leaving most animal species endangered or extinct. The main plot follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who has to "retire" (i.e. kill) six escaped Nexus-6 model androids, while a secondary plot follows John Isidore, a man of sub-par IQ who aids the fugitive androids.

The book served as the basis for the 1982 film Blade Runner and, even though some aspects of the novel were changed, many elements and themes from it were used in the film's 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049.

Following a devastating global war in what was then the near future the Earth's radioactively polluted atmosphere leads the United Nations to encourage mass emigrations to off-world colonies to preserve humanity's genetic integrity. Moving away from Earth comes with the incentive of free personal androids: robot servants identical to humans. The Rosen Association manufactures the androids on a colony on Mars, but some androids rebel and escape to Earth, where they hope to remain undetected. American and Soviet police departments remain vigilant and keep android bounty-hunting officers on duty.

On Earth, owning real live animals has become a fashionable status symbol, both because mass extinctions have made authentic animals rare and because of the accompanying cultural push for greater empathy. Poor people can only afford realistic-looking robot imitations of live animals. Rick Deckard, the novel's protagonist, for example, owns an electric black-faced sheep. The trend of increased empathy has coincidentally motivated a new technology-based religion called Mercerism, which uses "empathy boxes" to link users simultaneously to a virtual reality of collective suffering, centered on a martyr-like character, Wilbur Mercer, who eternally climbs up a hill while being hit with crashing stones. Acquiring high-status animal pets and linking in to empathy boxes appear to be the only two ways characters in the story strive for existential fulfilment.

Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department, is assigned to "retire" (kill) six androids of the new Nexus-6 model which have recently escaped from Mars and traveled to Earth. These androids are made of organic matter so similar to a human's that only a " bone marrow analysis" can prove the difference, making them almost impossible to distinguish from real people. The analysis is painful and lengthy, and is in most cases posthumous. Deckard hopes this mission will earn him enough money to buy a live animal to replace his lone electric sheep to comfort his depressed wife Iran. Deckard visits the Rosen Association's headquarters in Seattle to confirm the accuracy of the latest empathy test meant to identify incognito androids. Deckard suspects the test may not be capable of distinguishing the Nexus-6 models from genuine human beings, and it appears to give a false positive on his host in Seattle, Rachael Rosen, meaning the police have potentially been executing human beings. The Rosen Association attempts to blackmail Deckard to get him to drop the case, but Deckard retests Rachael and determines that Rachael is, indeed, an android, which she ultimately admits.

Deckard meets a Soviet police contact who turns out to be one of the Nexus-6 renegades in disguise. Deckard kills the android, then flies off to kill his next target, an android living in disguise as an opera singer. Meeting her backstage, Deckard attempts to administer the empathy test, but she calls the police. Failing to recognize Deckard as a bounty hunter, the cops arrest and detain him at a police station he has never heard of, filled with officers whom he is surprised to have never met. An official named Garland accuses Deckard of being an android with implanted memories. Garland, pointing a gun at Deckard, reveals that the entire station is a sham, claiming that both he and Phil Resch, the station's resident bounty hunter, are androids. Resch shoots Garland in the head, escaping with Deckard back to the opera singer, whom Resch kills in cold blood when she implies that he may be an android. Desperate to know the truth, Resch asks Deckard to administer the empathy test on him, which confirms that he is human. Deckard then tests himself, confirming that he is human but has a sense of empathy for certain androids.

Deckard is now able to buy his wife Iran an authentic Nubian goat with his commission. Later, his supervisor insists that he visit an abandoned apartment building where the three remaining android fugitives are assumed to be hiding. Experiencing a vision of the prophet-like Mercer telling him to proceed, despite the immorality of the mission, Deckard calls on Rachael again since her knowledge of android psychology may aid his investigation. Rachael declines to help, but reluctantly agrees to meet Deckard at a hotel in exchange for him abandoning the case. At the hotel, she reveals that one of the fugitive androids is the same model as her, meaning that he will have to kill an android that looks like her. Despite having initial doubts by Rachael, she and Deckard end up having sex, after which they confess their love for one another. Rachael reveals she has slept with many bounty hunters, having been programmed to do so in order to dissuade them from their missions. Deckard threatens to kill her but ultimately holds back and leaves for the abandoned apartment building.

The three remaining android fugitives plan to outwit Deckard. The building's only other inhabitant, John R. Isidore, a radioactively damaged and intellectually below-average human, attempts to befriend them. He is shocked when they callously torture and mutilate a rare spider he discovers. They all watch a television program which presents definitive evidence that the entire theology of Mercerism is a hoax. Deckard enters the building, experiencing strange, supernatural premonitions of Mercer notifying him of an ambush. When the androids attack him first, Deckard is legally justified as he kills all three without testing them beforehand. Isidore is devastated and Deckard is rewarded for a record number of Nexus-6 kills in a day. Returning home, Deckard finds Iran grieving because, while he was away, Rachael stopped by and killed their goat.

Deckard travels to an uninhabited, obliterated region of Oregon to reflect. He climbs a hill and is hit by falling rocks, realizing this is an experience eerily similar to Mercer's martyrdom. He stumbles upon what he thinks is a real toad (an animal thought to be extinct) but, when he returns home with it, he is crestfallen when Iran discovers it merely is a robot. As he goes to sleep, she prepares to care for the electric toad anyway.

Dick intentionally imitates noir fiction styles of scene delivery, a hard-boiled investigator dealing coldly with a brutal world full of corruption and stupidity. Another influence on Dick was author Theodore Sturgeon, writer of More Than Human, a surrealistic story of humanity broken into different tiers, one controlling another through telepathic means. A few years after the publication of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the author spoke about man's animate creations in a famous 1972 speech: " The Android and the Human":

Our environment - and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components - all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves... Rather than learning about ourselves by studying our constructs, perhaps we should make the attempt to comprehend what our constructs are up to by looking into what we ourselves are up to

In the novel, the android antagonists are indeed more human than the human protagonist, intentionally. They are a mirror held up to human action, contrasted with a culture losing its own humanity.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? influenced generations of science fiction writers, becoming a founding document of the new wave science fiction movement as well as a basic model for its cyberpunk heirs. It influenced other genres such as scifi-based metal from artists including Rob Zombie and Powerman 5000.

Hampton Fancher and David Peoples wrote a loose cinematic adaptation that became the film Blade Runner, released in 1982, featuring several of the novel's characters. It was directed by Ridley Scott. Following the international success of the film, the title Blade Runner was adopted for some later editions of the novel, although the term itself was not used in the original. This movie led to a sequel in 2017 entitled Blade Runner 2049 which retains many themes of the novel.

As part of their Dangerous Visions dystopia series in 2014, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a two-part adaptation of the novel. It was produced and directed by Sasha Yevtushenko from an adaption by Jonathan Holloway. It stars James Purefoy as Rick Deckard and Jessica Raine as Rachael Rosen. The episodes were originally broadcast on Sunday 15 June and 22 June 2014.

The novel has been released in audiobook form at least twice. A version was released in 1994 that featured Matthew Modine and Calista Flockhart.

A new audiobook version was released in 2007 by Random House Audio to coincide with the release of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. This version, read by Scott Brick, is unabridged and runs approximately 9.5 hours over eight CDs. This version is a tie-in, using the Blade Runner: The Final Cut film poster and Blade Runner title.

A stage adaptation of the book, written by Edward Einhorn, ran from November 18 to December 10, 2010, at the 3LD Art & Technology Center in New York and made its West Coast Premiere on September 13, 2013, playing until October 10 at the Sacred Fools Theater Company in Los Angeles.

BOOM! Studios published a 24-issue comic book limited series based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? containing the full text of the novel and illustrated by artist Tony Parker. The comic garnered a nomination for "Best New Series" from the 2010 Eisner Awards. In May 2010, BOOM! Studios began serializing an eight-issue prequel subtitled Dust To Dust, written by Chris Roberson and drawn by Robert Adler. The story takes place in the days immediately after World War Terminus.

Three novels intended as sequels to both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Blade Runner have been published:

These official and authorized sequels were written by Dick's friend K. W. Jeter. They continue the story of Rick Deckard and attempt to reconcile many of the differences between the novel and the 1982 film.

Critical reception of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has been overshadowed by the popularity of its 1982 film adaptation, Blade Runner. Of those critics who focus on the novel, several nest it predominantly in the history of Philip K. Dick's body of work. In particular, Dick's 1972 speech "The Human and the Android" is cited in this connection. Jill Galvan calls attention to the correspondence between Dick's portrayal of the narrative's dystopian, polluted, man-made setting and the description Dick gives in his speech of the increasingly artificial and potentially sentient or "quasi-alive" environment of his present. Summarizing the essential point of Dick's speech, Galvan argues, "[o]nly by recognizing how [technology] has encroached upon our understanding of 'life' can we come to full terms with the technologies we have produced" (414). As a " bildungsroman of the cybernetic age", Galvan maintains, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows one person's gradual acceptance of the new reality. Christopher Palmer emphasizes Dick's speech to bring to attention the increasingly dangerous risk of humans becoming "mechanical". "Androids threaten reduction of what makes life valuable, yet promise expansion or redefinition of it, and so do aliens and gods". Gregg Rickman cites another, earlier, and lesser-known Dick novel that also deals with androids, We Can Build You, asserting that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be read as a sequel.

In a departure from the tendency among most critics to examine the novel in relation to Dick's other texts, Klaus Benesch examined Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? primarily in connection with Jacques Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. There, Lacan claims that the formation and reassurance of the self depends on the construction of an Other through imagery, beginning with a double as seen in the mirror. The androids, Benesch argues, perform a doubling function similar to the mirror image of the self, but they do this on a social, not individual, scale. Therefore, human anxiety about androids expresses uncertainty about human identity and society. Benesch draws on Kathleen Woodward's emphasis on the body to illustrate the shape of human anxiety about an android Other. Woodward asserts that the debate over distinctions between human and machine usually fails to acknowledge the presence of the body. "If machines are invariably contrived as technological prostheses that are designed to amplify the physical faculties of the body, they are also built, according to this logic, to outdo, to surpass the human in the sphere of physicality altogether".

Sherryl Vint emphasizes the importance of animals for the novel's exploration of the alienation of humans from their authentic being. In wrestling with his role as a bounty hunter who is supposedly defending society from those who lack empathy, Deckard comes to realize the artificiality of the distinctions that have been used in American culture to exclude animals and "animalized" humans from ethical consideration. "The central role of animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the issues of species being that they raise show the need to struggle for a different way of being in the world. This way resists commodification in our relations with one another and with nature to produce a better future, one in which humans might be fully human once again by repairing our social relations with animals and nature."

1. ^ "BBC Radio 4 - Dangerous Visions, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Episode 2". bbc.co.uk. BBC Radio 4. 28 Jun 2014.

2. ^ Blade Runner (Movie-Tie-In Edition) by Philip K. Dick - Unabridged Compact Disc Random House, November 27, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7393-4275-6 (0-7393-4275-4).

3. ^ Philip K. Dick Press Release - BOOM! ANNOUNCES DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? Archived September 20, 2012, at the Wayback Machine

4. ^ "BOOM! Studios publishes 'Electric Sheep' prequel". Tyrell-corporation.pp.se. 22 October 2010.

5. ^ Galvan, Jill (1997). "Entering the Postman Collective: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Science Fiction Studies. 24 (3): 413-429.

6. ^ Palmer, Christopher (2003). Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press. p. 259.

7. ^ Rickman, Gregg (1995). "What Is This Sickness?": "Schizophrenia" and We Can Build You. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. pp. 143-157.

8. ^ Benesch, Klaus (1999). "Technology, Art, and the Cybernetic Body: The Cyborg as Cultural Other in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"". Amerikastudien. 44 (3): 379-392. JSTOR 41157479.

9. ^ Woodward, Kathleen (1997). "Prosthetic Emotions". In Hoffman, Gerhard (ed.). Emotions in the Postmodern. Heidelberg: Alfred Hornung. pp. 75-107.

10. ^ Woodward, Kathleen (1997). "Prosthetic Emotions". In Hoffman, Gerhard (ed.). Emotions in the Postmodern. Heidelberg: Alfred Hornung. p. 391.

11. ^ Vint, Sherryl (2007). "Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal. 40 (1): 125.

Benesch, Klaus (1999). "Technology, Art, and the Cybernetic Body: The Cyborg As Cultural Other in Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". Amerikastudien. 44 (3): 379-392. JSTOR 41157479.

Butler, Andrew M. (1991). "Reality versus Transience: An Examination of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner". In Merrifield, Jeff (ed.). Philip K. Dick: A Celebration (Programme Book). Epping Forest College, Loughton: Connections.

Gallo, Domenico (2002). "Avvampando gli angeli caddero: Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick e il cyberpunk". In Bertetti; Scolari (eds.). Lo sguardo degli angeli: Intorno e oltre Blade Runner (in Italian). Torino: Testo & Immagine. pp. 206-218. ISBN 88-8382-075-4.

Galvan, Jill (1997). "Entering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Science-Fiction Studies. 24 (3): 413-429. JSTOR 4240644.

McCarthy, Patrick A. (1999-2000). "Do Androids Dream of Magic Flutes?". Paradoxa. 5 (13-14): 344-352.

Niv, Tal (2014). "The Return of a Terrifying and Wonderful Creation On Our Future and Our Present". . (Hebrew) Critical analysis of the 2014 edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Street, Joe (2020). "Do Androids Dream of Black Sheep?: Reading Race into Philip K. Dick". Foundation. 49 (3): 44-61.

Vint, Sherryl (2007). "Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". Mosaic. 40 (1): 111-26.

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Wikipedia

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (retrospectively titled Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in some later printings) is a 1968 dystopian science fiction novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. It is set in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, where Earth's life has been greatly damaged by a nuclear global war, leaving most animal species endangered or extinct.

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One of the few intelligent films surrounding the topic of androids.

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Ex Machina Review: Finally, an Artificial Intelligence Movie with Some Brains

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Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson may be headed for the big spectacle of Star Wars, but their first sci-fi collaboration is refreshingly small and smart.

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I have completed many of these. What a pain.

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The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950,[2] is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a hu…

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I would enjoy a robot dog companion on my patrols.

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Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids 2024: 22-24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today's videos!

Just when I thought quadrupeds couldn't impress me anymore...

[ Unitree Robotics ]

Researchers at Meta FAIR are releasing several new research artifacts that advance robotics and support our goal of reaching advanced machine intelligence (AMI). These include Meta Sparsh, the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks; Meta Digit 360, an artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor that delivers detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing; and Meta Digit Plexus, a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions that enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable.

The first bimanual Torso created at Clone includes an actuated elbow, cervical spine (neck), and anthropomorphic shoulders with the sternoclavicular, acromioclavicular, scapulothoracic and glenohumeral joints. The valve matrix fits compactly inside the ribcage. Bimanual manipulation training is in progress.

Equipped with a new behavior architecture, Nadia navigates and traverses many types of doors autonomously. Nadia also demonstrates robustness to failed grasps and door opening attempts by automatically retrying and continuing. We present the robot with pull and push doors, four types of opening mechanisms, and even spring-loaded door closers. A deep neural network and door plane estimator allow Nadia to identify and track the doors.

[ Paper preprint by authors from Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition ]

Thanks, Duncan!

In this study, we integrate the musculoskeletal humanoid Musashi with the wire-driven robot CubiX, capable of connecting to the environment, to form CubiXMusashi. This combination addresses the shortcomings of traditional musculoskeletal humanoids and enables movements beyond the capabilities of other humanoids. CubiXMusashi connects to the environment with wires and drives by winding them, successfully achieving movements such as pull-up, rising from a lying pose, and mid-air kicking, which are difficult for Musashi alone.

[ CubiXMusashi, JSK Robotics Laboratory, University of Tokyo ]

Thanks, Shintaro!

An old boardwalk seems like a nightmare for any robot with flat feet.

[ Agility Robotics ]

This paper presents a novel learning-based control framework that uses keyframing to incorporate high-level objectives in natural locomotion for legged robots. These high-level objectives are specified as a variable number of partial or complete pose targets that are spaced arbitrarily in time. Our proposed framework utilizes a multi-critic reinforcement learning algorithm to effectively handle the mixture of dense and sparse rewards. In the experiments, the multi-critic method significantly reduces the effort of hyperparameter tuning compared to the standard single-critic alternative. Moreover, the proposed transformer-based architecture enables robots to anticipate future goals, which results in quantitative improvements in their ability to reach their targets.

[ Disney Research paper ]

Human-like walking where that human is the stompiest human to ever human its way through Humanville.

We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous flight in unknown environments is difficult in part due to the sensor limitations of traditional onboard cameras. Event cameras, however, promise nearly zero motion blur and high dynamic range, but produce a large volume of events under significant ego-motion and further lack a continuous-time sensor model in simulation, making direct sim-to-real transfer not possible.

[ Paper University of Pennsylvania and University of Zurich ]

Cross-embodiment imitation learning enables policies trained on specific embodiments to transfer across different robots, unlocking the potential for large-scale imitation learning that is both cost-effective and highly reusable. This paper presents LEGATO, a cross-embodiment imitation learning framework for visuomotor skill transfer across varied kinematic morphologies. We introduce a handheld gripper that unifies action and observation spaces, allowing tasks to be defined consistently across robots.

The 2024 Xi'an Marathon has kicked off! STAR1, the general-purpose humanoid robot from Robot Era, joins runners in this ancient yet modern city for an exciting start!

In robotics, there are valuable lessons for students and mentors alike. Watch how the CyberKnights, a FIRST robotics team champion sponsored by RTX, with the encouragement of their RTX mentor, faced challenges after a poor performance and scrapped its robot to build a new one in just nine days.

[ CyberKnights ]

In this special video, PAL Robotics takes you behind the scenes of our 20th-anniversary celebration, a memorable gathering with industry leaders and visionaries from across robotics and technology. From inspiring speeches to milestone highlights, the event was a testament to our journey and the incredible partnerships that have shaped our path.

[ PAL Robotics ]

Thanks, Rugilė!

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Evan Ackerman

Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. Since 2007, he has written over 6,000 articles on robotics and technology. He has a degree in Martian geology and is excellent at playing bagpipes.

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Can a Real Dog Do Handstands Like This Robot?

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A quadruped doing handstands from Unitree and a new robotic finger from Meta AI are featured in this edition of Video Friday, a collection of robotics videos showcasing the latest developments from various robotics companies and researchers.

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I cannot leave my city. But if I did, this is where I would visit.

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HOW TO PLAN A VISIT TO SPACE CENTER HOUSTON: NOW OPEN WITH NEW SAFETY MEASURES - a tasteful trip

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What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Houston, Texas? NASA! Growing up in Houston, I loved visiting Space Center Houston and learning something new about space exploration each time I visited. That is why I am excited to share my collaboration with the Official Visitor Center of NASA Johnson Space