"It left a huge impression on us. For example, the movies are almost real. It's an example that makes us think a lot because the indigenous are defending their rights. We have to defend just as the indigenous so clearly defended in the movie. We had an uprising we had a confrontation with gases; it's the same as what we just saw in the movie."

"This is a Hollywood movie, so it's practically a given that a mestizo comes to the defense and leads (the people) to triumph in the end."

"A simple rule of robotic personality seems to be: don’t make things the most efficient way," said Magnus Wurzer, who has been running the Vienna-based Roboexotica, a festival where scientists have gone to build, showcase and discuss "cocktail robots" since 1999.

One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it "buys" itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, "like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?" Mr. Wurzer says, "We had that.

Roboexotica has inspired a stateside version as well, which just had its third annual celebration in San Francisco.

And in at least one case in Europe, a robot actually got behind a bar. From 1999 to 2002, a scarlet-eyed metal robot named Cynthia poured drinks at Cynthia's Bridge Bar and Lounge in London. But according to Mr. Wurzer, "she was too costly to maintain once the bar was sold by the robot's maker."

Pomona College (Pomona, California) at 10:30am on Thursday, February 25th.

What can you do with one button? In an age of ever-more-complex touch interfaces, we'd like to imagine what a single, tangible, hardware button can mean for a design.

[...]

This call seeks to inspire unique hardware/software hacks that integrate playful, one-button interaction within a standalone machine or device. The curators are seeking circuit-bent gadgets, retro-fitted consoles, mechanical constructions, custom electronics, and other one-off creations. During the week of the Game Developers Conference, the Game Objects will be featured in an exhibit at the Gray Area Foundation, a new collaboration and exhibition venue revitalizing the Tenderloin, near the Moscone Center. A selection of these Objects will be shown at the opening night Gamma party, alongside the software-based Gamma4 one-button games, on March 10th at the Mezzanine in SoMa.

In a world where robots and humans struggle together in the fight against boredom...
Only one event ends up with the robots dancing "The Human" while the meat puppets (you) end up singing the praises of RoboBartenders.
This February, come hang out with some alternate life-forms at BarBot 2010.

"Other than the benefit of having more time, what will happen is a reduction in inequality and the potential to be better-quality friends, partners and parents engaging more with communities."

Like good science fiction, the material collected in Do Androids Sleep With Electric Sheep? leaves us with more questions than we arrived with; if you can stomach the subject matter (which shouldn't really appall anyone but the most prudish and conservative, to be honest, though my perceptions may be somewhat skewed), this is prime fuel for your imaginatory engines. The focal character of James Tiptree, Jr.'s story "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" suggests that, as humans, "we're built to dream outwards" [pp 239], to project our desire onto "the other", whoever or whatever it may happen to be. It's an insight that makes more sense each time you read it, and serves to underline the basic commonality between sex and science fiction, or indeed art in general -- they are both ways in which we try to subsume ourselves into (or control and dominate over) that which we are not.
Love makes us do strange things, after all.