GENOMICON

Ok, I made that up. In actual fact you swallow it, and it swims around inside you, doing all sorts of medical robot stuff

How cool is that? It has tiny little propellers etc. Looks like it’s 3D printed as well.

There are a load of medical robots over at New Scientist, and they all look slightly scary if you ask me – though possibly less so than someone wearing a mask and wielding a scalpel.

That green one at the end was particularly scary. These people don’t really get androidal xenophobia. Making something look a bit human is worse than leaving it as a machine. If you want people to relate to it as though it’s a… “being” then give it eyes that blink, and follow things about, eg:

It’s really not that hard I don’t think… if you’re smart enough to make a robot to pick someone up – which of course I’m not, so what do I know etc.

Human powers of anthropomorphism are unstoppably powerful. As Bruce Stirling said about some laser-projected smart-seeming tadpole creatures… no one looked up. Even when it was pointed out that these things were being projected from the ceiling people went “oh yea”, then went back to looking at them as though they were real creatures.

And we like them. We just can’t deal with them looking like weird mask-wearing psycho-clowns.