Johnny-Five Is Alive!

By Alicia Dorr in News on Nov 17, 2006 4:04PM

No matter how many movies come out about something, no matter how many times we've seen the world blown up on the big screen due to our careless ways — we still have to go and invent stuff. Hell, someone's probably out splicing velociraptor genomes right now. You know how we know? Because the 21st century is right here, in Chicago.

While it is not in the form of hoverboards, it is in the form of robocops. By January, the Chicago police will have a total of four androids to kick around. At $135,000 a pop, these "bomb robots" can be sent into hostile situations, defuse bombs, fire water from its cannon (water cannon!), and zoom/pan/tilt/night visionify with its cameras. The only thing it apparently has trouble doing is climbing up stairs, as the first robot, Frank, demonstrated yesterday.

This is all well and good, of course, but we can't help but wonder what's going on behind those beady little camera eyes. Andros F6A may just be the great-granddaddy of some other, more social robots (the kind who cut in line at competitions), but when the mayor says he'd rather have the robot blown up than an officer does its little grabhand turn up towards the sky as it laments, "Why, oh, why was I programmed to feel feelings?!" This "amazing technology" has seen combat in Iraq, you know, and it might be coming home with some pretty hefty issues. We're just sayin, s'all.

Image via City of Denton, Texas.