Self-healing 'living skin' can make robots more humanlike | Hacker News Reader

Self-healing 'living skin' can make robots more humanlike

livescience.com

42 pointsavivallssa48 comments

The Torment Nexus tech is really coming together

Can it unpack the dishwasher yet ?

Also why do I see Mark Zuckerberg in the first image ?

HERB from 10 years ago was said to be able to unload dishwashers, but I only find videos of it manipulating a bottle of drink:

- http://web.archive.org/web/20130801064313/personalrobotics.r...

- https://youtu.be/PEg9ay-Wy-M

Buy two dishwashers and use one as a cup board for clean dishes and one for dirty dishes. When the dirty one is reasonably full simply run the cleaning program.

A dishwasher is a shitty cupboard.

So, do I need a massive dishwasher that can hold all the pans, and then another one as a spare?

This was also the solution in Terminator to make the machines pass as human.

That's a great point! The idea of robots with living skin raises so many questions. Do you think this technology could actually lead to robots that are indistinguishable from humans in our lifetime? And what ethical implications should we consider as we get closer to this reality? How should laws and regulations evolve to address these advancements?

There's a concept in science fiction called a bioroid, in which android are made of completely or mostly biological components. Think of a human body but almost entirely artificially engineered with biological systems.

I suspect in reality, human bodies may become more machine-like and more biologically engineered rather than just the focus on restoring functionality and health.

Biots in Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur Clarke. Also one of the big bad enemies of the polity universe by Neal Asher is a species that can perform biological modifications to their own bodies by thinking about it.

Wasn't this in the plot of Westworld? They started with mechanical robots, but discovered that bio-based machines were easier to grow/repair?

Plus if used for internals it would mean it would be resistant to EMP weapons, allowing for more robust (both bio and electro-mech) armed forces.

Looks like that Alex clone from The Last Starfighter.

This is an old school reference, and I (and my childhood) approve completely. That scene freaked me out.

"The T-800 Terminator was Skynet's first cybernetic organism, with living tissue over a hyperalloy endoskeleton. This made it Skynet's first successful Infiltrator unit, capable of infiltrating the Resistance."

Skynet is also just another word to say “cloud”.

The cloud is "someone else's computer". Skynet may have started that way, but shortly after its deployment it was able to take control of the interactive and run itself with no one "else" in the way.

would it serve more functional needs as well f.e. cooling down by "sweating" ?

Actually, touch sensors is what it needs. This is illustrated by wearing gloves. It's surprising how hard it is to manipulate objects without good touch sensors.

> It's surprising how hard it is to manipulate objects without good touch sensors.

Thread a nut onto a bolt. The coordination between the feel of the nut engaging the threads, along with the just right amount of pressure, is exquisite.

As long as it cannot show anger and frustration, due to "sweating", it may be an interesting behavior.

god that would just make it even more creepier

It's already creepy if you understand where the source material comes from.

> In their experiments, the researchers used commercially available human cells, purchasing what are called Normal Human Dermal Fibroblasts (NHDFs) and Normal Human Epidermal Keratinocytes (NHEKs) that were isolated from either juvenile foreskin or different skin locations from adult donors by a company called PromoCell GmbH.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/researchers-craft-sm...

Let me coin the first slur for our foreskin-suit robot overlords.

It rubs the lotion on the skin.

No thank you. Can I get a different timeline?

kids wearing baloney mask.jpg

Nice someone exploring this, but seems like priority should be on eyes/lips movement. The leap Valve made to make avatars more believable by improving those domains is much larger than SSS and other efforts to increase skin realism a decade later.

"The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy, but these are new. They look human... sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot. I had to wait till he moved on you before I could zero him."

I only saw a few episodes of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but I always loved the detail of what was, presumably, a 600 series terminator holding a group of them hostage in a house.

I missed that!

3,400 years later, will it become a sandworm?

Straight from All Tomorrows book.

Now it only needs your jacket, your boots, and your motorcycle.

Laundry day, nothing to wear

Nope.

There’s only one reason why people want to make robots “humanlike”. It’s sickening.

To keep the elderly from feeling lonely?

The answer to that is not banning apartments through the vast majorities of our cities, forcing everything to be spread out so that you have to drive a car to participate in society. If the elderly could just walk to where they needed to go or walk around for leisure, they would not age as fast.

I shouldn’t have an old lady approach me to help her across a 2 lane + left turn road in Ann Arbor MI because she is afraid she will get hit again.

Human looking robots would be such a dystopian and sad solution to elderly loneliness. They need a third place and access to such in old age.

> I shouldn’t have an old lady approach me to help her across a 2 lane + left turn road

Where are the Boy Scouts when you need one?

It's important to realise in cases like this you mean it is sickening to you personally (and potentially others). Your wording takes a personal value judgement and clothes it in words that hint at an objective moral judgement.

Let’s see if you’re this defensive when there’s “humanlike robots” imitating children

Can I come with you?

* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/quotes/?item=qt0315389&...

Oh that's where your mind went to, I hadn't thought about it that way.

So now you owe me an upvote

Assuming what you say is true, wouldn't a clamp-down response to it result in a future where people with a propensity to do these fucked-up things have no outlet but a real child, but a more liberal approach have the result of fewer hurt children?

I mean, to me the entire issue is of mental health, and would ideally be addressed that way, but assuming all else is equal any alternative to a kid being harmed should be preferable no matter how otherwise messed up the thing is in and of itself.

Perhaps in the future where we've perfected child sex cyborgs we will have also figured out how to just fix the defect in pedophiles so we won't need the cyborgs?

anybody who has these sort of feelings toward children should be found and restrained

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