The Modern Robot

You know what I hate? The declining image of "The Robot." Robots used to be cool. Like R2D2 with his little lights blinking and his little neckless head spinning from side to side. And Wall-E with his penchant for collecting odd crap, and his cool built-in storage area. And don't even get me started on Kitt. Super-Pursuit Cruise Control, voice controllled, built-in lie detector AND EKG machine!

And we had Johnny 5 (who came ALIVE). And don't forget Asimo who was certainly no Assihole.

But then, somewhere along the way, the Googles and Yahoos and Facebooks started to "reinvent" the robot. Into Spambots. Even the name is degrading. "I'm a Spambot. No, not like the canned meat that you have to open by peeling the metal with a tiny key, but the SPAM that is junk mail that annoys the shit out of every human alive." You really can't win friends with a name like Spambot.

I suspect that the decline of the robot is akin to the decline of human civilization. Robots, apparently, are getting dumber. When I was a kid, KITT could summon his Molecular Bonded Shell to drive over bombs and withstand acid attacks. The robots of today hunt and peck for some easily decoded word that will gain them access to the comments board of some girl's virtually unread blog. The modern robot needs to get a life.

Also, have you noticed that the modern robot can only read ONE word. It's true! Well, at least it must be true. Because Google has THIS image appear when one tries to leave a comment on just about any web space.

This makes me sad. Not to mention annoyed that I have to type two whole words just to post a comment on a blog. What is this world coming to? Next thing you know I will have to enter a password in order to be able to enter my password.

So, yes, tell me we're not on a course for destruction. We've gone from this:

To this?

Progress? I don't think so. The robots of today are a true pain in the Assimo.