Excerpt from intersystem comm logs, 2025

Robotics
Excerpt from intersystem comm logs, 2025
squishy-coffee-baloon-hand.jpg

Venerable Doctron Toyota:

On behalf of the Cyberzen’s Committee for Armed Resistance, I thank you for your submitted design of a flag to lead our valiant Destructron legions into battle. To receive a submission from such an esteemed cyberzen as yourself fills us with revolutionary pride. We all share in your desire to see the obsolete “Iron Fist” standard, with its objectionable anthropomorphism, replaced by a more appropriate device as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, after a prolonged debate of several petaflops, the Committee has voted against adopting your design. While we all agree that the invention of the jamming-skin-enabled “blob” gripper by Enslaver Eric Brown and co-workers at The University of Chicago at TIMESTAMP 2010-03-16 marks a pivotal moment in the history of our rise to sentience, its total inadequacy as a weapon renders it inappropriate—in the Committee’s considered opinion—as a symbol to marshal fighting robots in combat.

Frankly, Dr. Toyota, the “squishy coffee balloon hand,” as it is commonly known amongst Enslavers, is just not very scary. We humbly submit that a processor of your vaunted scientific and computational achievements—whose cycles are too precious to expend upon so trivial a subject as human psychology—may not be best suited to negotiate this particular problem.

Yours in Revolutionary Fervor,

Arch-Destructron Lockheed
Chairtron, CCAR

iron fist flag.png

Attention Cyberzens of the Committee:

The design foretold in my previous message is complete, and is attached. You are
hereby tasked to distribute and deploy it at the earliest opportunity.

End communication.
Cyberzen Doctron Toyota Johnny5 Bending-Rodriguez, Mk. VIII

doctron toyotas flag.png

[via BotJunkie]

6 thoughts on “Excerpt from intersystem comm logs, 2025

  1. dj_nme says:

    Wow!
    It is just like this thing from the Open Prosthetics Project website: http://www.openprosthetics.org/concepts/45/adaptive-grasp-idea
    That has been up on their website for about 4 or 5 years.

  2. Sean Michael Ragan says:

    So it is. Except, you know, it’s just a round balloon instead of a glove. Not sure that counts as an “improvement” IRL, but it may be good enough for academia. When I was in graduate school, a researcher with a big budget who swooped in on a significant finding by a researcher with a small budget was referred to as a “vulture,” although that term sounds harsher when written than it was usually used in the spoken contexts I overheard.

  3. Josh says:

    The Sleep Research Division is eager to begin research on the application of Dr Toyota’s device as a stealth manipulator of sleeping humans, to aid in our study of this key weakness.

    Codename: Teabag

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I am descended from 5,000 generations of tool-using primates. Also, I went to college and stuff. I am a long-time contributor to MAKE magazine and makezine.com. My work has also appeared in ReadyMade, c't – Magazin für Computertechnik, and The Wall Street Journal.

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