£1 million for soup stirring robot (Big deal: I know a guy who stirs up trouble for $720 million a day)
Mary Shelly has a lot to answer for: Almost two centuries after she wrote THAT book, people still look at scientists with a decidedly distrustful eye. It’s a look that more or less says, ‘Hey, I’m not saying that you ARE creating a monster in your lab that will kill us all but I AM watching you!
Strangely enough, there’s that quite opposite type of archetype that’s pinned to the whitecoat’s white coat: that of the inept and farcical bungler. Far from being a Godlike madman who creates cumbersome creatures with all kinds of interesting scars and bolts through their necks, the scientist is seen as someone who couldn’t build a function mouse trap, let alone some evil kind of Supermouse.
The next story, obviously, belongs to this second ‘Hey, look what those silly scientists are up to now!’ variety - and I agree it all seems more than a bit silly:
British scientists have won a £1 million grant to find out if a robot can safely be employed to stir soup in a kitchen, it emerged today. The project called Co-operative Human Robot Interaction Systems (CHRIS) and based at the Bristol Robotics Lab (BRL) has been funded by the European Commission. A lab spokeswoman said today:
“It will specifically look at the problems of a human and a robot working together in the same space, for example in a kitchen where the service robot is performing a task such as stirring soup, while you add cream.”
Which makes you wonder how much money it would save if people just ate clear soups.
Still, £1 million for a robot that stirs soup doesn’t seem so expensive - not if you compare it to a certain president whose only function seems to be to stir up trouble:
The Iraq war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group’s analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.
Give me that soup-stirring robot any day of the week, says I…
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