Robots At Sundance

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 28 of January , 2010 at 4:45 am

The Sundance Film Festival that took place last week featured a couple interesting robot films… This first one, by director Spike Jonze, is called I’m Here:

The film is 30 minutes long, and Entertainment Weekly says that it “feels like a modern-day retelling of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, with two crudely constructed robots serving as the protagonists.” It may show up in its entirety on the Independent Film Channel later this year.

VIA [ io9 ]

Honda was also at Sundance to screen a wonderful 8 minute documentary called Living With Robots, which is totally worth watching simply because of how well it sums up so many of the issues relevant to robotics today and in the near future:

Honda’s got it exactly right: the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to the future of robotics is not technical, but rather an issue of public perception. At the end of the video, Mark Rowlands says “whatever robots turn out to be, will largely be a function of us, and the decisions we make.” This is an excellent point… If we have concerns about robots, it’s important to acknowledge that those concerns generally can’t, by definition, be about the robots themselves. Rather, we must understand that robots are a reflection, or perhaps more accurately a physical embodiment, of human desire, and it’s those desires and how we act on them that need to be examined.

So if there are issues surrounding things like, oh, I don’t know, military robots, we need to recognize that military robots only exist because of human conflict. They’re not terminators, they’re not out to get us, they’re there because we made them and decided that they were important and necessary. This doesn’t answer the question of whether they’re a good idea or a bad idea, but the point is that you can’t look at robots as something separate from the human experience.

You can see more footage of those ASIMOs wandering around an office environment in this post from 2007.

[ Honda Press Release ]

Comments (4)

Category: General

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4 Comments

Made Thursday, 28 of January , 2010 at 8:49 am

The Honda short documentary was nice :D those people sure know they stuff.
About the movie, i’m not so sure, i think it looks like a normal “human” drama.

Comment by Andy

Made Friday, 29 of January , 2010 at 12:59 am

“I’m Here” looks awesome! I can’t wait for it to come out.

Comment by Joey1058

Made Saturday, 30 of January , 2010 at 1:20 pm

Well said about the human factor. If it looks creepy, the engineers can change the face. But it really up to humanity to come to grips. Because robots aren’t going away. And they can’t stay in the background, out of sight forever.

Comment by classy

Made Monday, 1 of February , 2010 at 2:50 pm

i always thought making a robot exactly like us was limited, the most useful robot would be like the sentienals with tentacle arms.. that can do pretty much anything and get anywhere.

p.s. that blonde chick working at honda is hot