Robots suck!

They don't of course. They are the coolest thing in the world, especially to my four year old son, who thinks that robots, Lego, and Star Wars are all the coolest things in his world.

So Lego Star Wars, which has Lego R3D2 and C3PO robots in it, is a perfect storm of coolness.

My wife got him a Star Wars toy the other day and didn't realize she was buying a Star Wars *Tansformer* toy... which meant it *turns into* a robot. Coolness intensifies.

Tom was pointing out all the parts of the robot to me, saying "these are his guns, these are his wings, and this is the part that sucks up the dirt".

Of course, these are the types of things one might infer if you grow up around robots.

Speaking of objects of desire...

The other day in the cafe at work, a friend of mine was sitting bemused at a table, a little star-wars-looking egg sitting on the table in front of her.

It was Sony's 'Rolly', a little music-driven robot bluetooth connected MP3 player thingy that... well hell, I have no idea what it does. I just know it was the coolest thing I'd seen since Aibo.





I want one to keep my Roomba company! Perhaps as a cheerleader!

The future is now

Two different sentence fragments from my past week:

The first was my son Tom, when he and I were looking for one of his toys.

"Maybe the robot sucked it up. Can you look inside him?", he said. He was talking about (and personifying!) Roomba of course. It occurred to me that even 10 years ago this might have seemed like science fiction. My kids are growing up with a robot member of the household.

The second was one I uttered to a co-worker. A while ago Wired mag had a series of 6-word science fiction very short stories from known authors (e.g. "The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly." - Orson Scott Card).

I found myself saying something this week that would stand on it's own among those in that article, even if it's a bit longer than six words; "Loan me a memory stick, before I forget".