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Who’s afraid of robots?

Ezio Di Nucci (Duisburg-Essen) and Filippo Santoni de Sio (TUDelft): Who’s Afraid of Robots? Fear of Automation and the Ideal of Direct Control. David Gunkel (NIU): The Rights of Machines: Caring for Robotic Care Givers. Cameron Hamilton (Georgia State): On the Possibility of Robots Having Emotions. From the inaugural issue of Intervalla, a special section on social robots and emotion: Transcending the boundary between humans and ICTs. “How do robots have sex?” sounds like the set-up line for a bad joke; using robots to model an evolutionary conundrum. Would you fuck a robot? You would probably fuck a robot. Something any man can be proud of: The humble sperm has inspired a new robot, the MagnetoSperm — or “bro-bot”. Ryan Jacobs on how the elderly fear their future robot friends will corrupt children. From the International Journal of Machine Consciousness, a collective review of the books Aristotle's Laptop: The Discovery of Our Informational Mind by Igor Aleksander and Helen Morton and Consciousness and Robot Sentience by Pentti O. Haikonen. Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering Ray Kurzweil thinks so. US military begins research into moral, ethical robots, to stave off Skynet-like apocalypse. Who’s afraid of killer robots (and why)? Cory Doctorow on why it is not possible to regulate robots: We regulate machines, from drills to defibrillators, but what distinguishes a power-drill from a robot-drill? Researchers have invented insect-sized robots that can swarm together and build just about anything. Evan Selinger on how the emerging “Internet of Things” is turning us into robots. Forget robots — we’ll soon be fusing technology with living matter. Researchers put robots in conversation, and the result is somewhere between romantic bickering and dorm-room existentialism.