This Week in Humanity Seeking Its Own Destruction: South Korea Has Created a Liquid Metal Robot
It's in moments like this that I realize as cynical and fatalistic as I try to be, as low an opinion as I try to have about humankind with all my negativistic Massholery, I'm still as naive and trusting as a toddler.
I mean, here I was, thinking that we were on the verge of an age of discovery. That quantum leaps in things like space telescopes, AI, neural links, and nanobots were going to bring forth a world of limitless potential. We'd be studying space to the ends of the observable universe. Colonizing Mars. Mapping the human genome. Helping the blind to see and the paralyzed to walk.
Oh, Jer Bear. You sweet summer child. No, instead while we've been waiting on, oh I don't know, nuclear fusion to give us unlimited renewable energy, our brightest minds have been working on the T-1000 nobody asked for:
Here's a more in-depth video than the one above:
And more detail:
IFL Science - Something that distinguishes current robots from living creatures is rigidity. Cells are often squishy, while robots' usual plastic and metal structures are not. There are some examples of softer robots but researchers from Gachon University and Seoul National University might have come up with something even trippier: a liquid robot.
The robot is not self-propelled but it is moved using acoustic radiation – namely ultrasound. And with that, this gumdrop robot can do a variety of things. It can freely deform, divide, merge, and even engulf alien substances and carry them away. The researchers are calling it a Particle-armored liquid roBot (PB). …
“We have reported particle-armored liquid robots (PBs), an innovative class of liquid robot that captures the dynamic capabilities and structural resilience of biological cells, despite differences in size and the dominant forces at work,” the researchers wrote in a paper describing the robot. …
"PBs have shown proficiency in various functions, such as navigating intricate environments, engulfing and transporting cargoes, crossing water and land boundaries, and seamlessly merging to adapt to new operational requirements. These capabilities will greatly increase the utility of robots in unpredictable and dynamically changing environments.”
So much for those of us who thought by now we'd have flying cars. Looks like I'll have to wait a bit longer for my Iron Man suit. No, the lab-coated twerps at Cyberydne Systems - I mean, Gachon U. and Seoul National - had to fast track the means of our inevitable destruction. Judgement Day wasn't coming soon enough, so they decided to speed the process. And since it's unlikely a kind, loyal, though more primitive robot with an Austrian accent has been reprogrammed by our unborn future children to protect us and happens to come teleporting through spacetime, we're utterly helpless against this amorphous chrome goo.
So thanks, nerds. I'm sure you'll find a half dozen practical uses for this stuff and win some Nobel Prizes before it becomes sentient and starts hunting the species it thinks is infesting the planet. Just know that's your skull that's going to be crushed under their metallic feet too. But in a way, I guess we're lucky. The title card of Terminator 2 reads:
"3 billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They only lived to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines."
So we dodged this shape-shifting bullet for almost 30 years longer than James Cameron imagined. Which is a win? I guess? Anyway, if I don't post for the next few days, it only means I'm pricing out tanker trucks filled with Liquid Nitrogen and putting down a deposit on a steel factory. Come with me if you want to live.
