Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Great Technological Strides In Parenting

As I've said many times, all this fun we are having just serves to amuse us as we blindly trudge towards the inevitable robot uprising and eventual total enslavement of the human race.
Be sure to cram in as much awesome as possible, since we are all completely doomed.
Our latest Manuary announcement is in the field of military/parenting research.
Apparently, the military is soliciting help creating a chat bot to stand in for parents deployed overseas for extended periods of time.
Targeted (as in demographics, not as in laser sight) at children aged 3-5, these avatars of missing parents should respond to questions in a realistic and nurturing manner.
Of course, the replacement of our families with robotic duplicates is fortunately never a nightmare suffered by children and there is absolutely no reason to believe it will result in adults who are drawn to machines and shun the contact of carbon-based life.
In fact, we should immediately be looking at civilian uses for this new military technology.
Nuclear power, GPS navigation and the very interwebz themselves all had their start with programs in the Department of Defense.
Clinging remora-like to Manuary, I'll go over a few ways this can only result in good things for us manly men.
This robotic pseudo-sentient creation can find all kinds of applications outside of comforting lonely children. Let's face it, we coddle kids way too much as it is.
A little isolation might just do them some good. And if missing Mommy and Daddy fills them with a little patriotic urge to follow their brave footsteps onto the field of battle, it can only be good for the economy.
Replacing myself with a robotic avatar at home would free me from family interaction time and allow me to pursue more man-oriented things.
I could lock myself in the garage with the shop vac and drink and grow my beard with little guilt knowing that my daughter was getting a pre-programmed "I love you" from someone who looks a little like me . . . If more sober and clean-shaven.
If this robot could clean out the cat box and drag the trash out on Monday nights (and the stupid recycling which I always forget on Friday morning) I would really have little reason to ever drag myself home from the bar/shooting range/deer stand/Hooter's.
Knowing there is a robo-me at home to instill values in my child and play with the cats could allow me to spend more time free-lifting at the gym and stopping at the local flea market to hone my rusting taxidermy skills.
Those squirrels aren't going to stuff themselves and then carefully arrange each other into amusing and/or obscene dioramas.
Of course, it may mean that eventually the next generation (soft as they are) could be manipulated into oppressing themselves under these cold and calculating robotic fiends, but even that has its upsides.
There hasn't been a decent zombie invasion in hundreds of years. Vampires and werewolves are obviously disinterested or they would totally be eating a lot of emo kids hanging out at Hot Topic at the mall just for making people less afraid of vampires and werewolves. Any aliens planning to invade seem to be not following through due to some fear of the common cold or, in some cases, fascination with the human ability to love.
As men, our only real chance at unleashing some serious action movie style violence is in our (undoubtedly doomed) uprising against the rightful silicon-based overlords of the Earth.
Now, if these robots are developed with the ability to grow facial hair and objectify women, I think we are in some serious trouble.

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