Robot Journalist Provides Autonomic News Coverage
This robot journalist was developed at the Intelligent Systems Informatics Lab (ISI) at Tokyo University. It can explore its environment in a fully autonomous fashion and then report on what it finds, taking pictures with its onboard camera.
The journalist robot can even ask nearby people for more information and use internet searches for details. Once it decides that a newsworthy story is ready, it can publish it to the web.
(Robot journalist accost bystander.)
This device is science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's autonomic interviewer brought to life. This fictional robot journalist appeared in his 1965 novel The Zap Gun:
"Mr. Lars, sir."
"I'm afraid I only have a moment to talk to your viewers. Sorry." He started on, but the autonomic TV interviewer, camera in its hand, blocked his path. The metal smile of the creature glittered confidently...
"Look," he said, this time gently, as if the autonomic interviewer were really alive and not merely an arbitrarily endowed sentient concoction of the ingenuity of Wes-block technology of A.D. 2004.
As you can see, Mr. Dick was off by only a handful of years with this prediction.
All that is now needed is for Google to hook up its news.google.com site with these robot journalists, and they will have brought Dick's homeostatic newspapers (also called homeopapes for short) to life.
