This Just In: Robots Fix the Gulf of Mexico (and everything else we’ve screwed up)

The Associated Press is reporting that robots are being used to lower a giant concrete box onto the oil spill which has destroyed the Gulf of Mexico.   According to Bill Salvin, who is some dude from BP, “We are essentially taking a four-story building and lowering it 5,000 feet and setting it on the head of a pin.”  Once the monolith is lowered onto the oil spill, robots with headlights and cameras will be used to move it into place (think The Abyss).

Hooray for their attempts to get a handle on this situation (finally), but what really struck me as interesting was that we are using robots to fix a major problem caused by humans.  This might not seem like much, but there’s a lot of significance in the act.  When I imagine humanity’s future, I always see us freed from a lifetime of labor by the wonders of robotics; and now that we have all this talk about “the singularity,” which is like a perpetual motion machine for technological advancement, the future is looking more like the World of Tomorrow and less like Blade Runner (not that I’d mind a gritty noiristic future).  Of course, we won’t be here unless we all get synthetic organs, but we can still preach the new gospel of robotics by pointing out examples such as this oil spill…and Papero.

This guy was initially used to capture leaked oil

Papero is the domestic companion with eerie self-awareness