Terrifying Robot Update: Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Don't worry about drones, we can destroy them now with robot laser cannons...wait what do you mean the same people who have the drones also have the robot laser cannons?

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For six straight years, the two-story, single-family house in Campbell Creek, Tennessee pretended to be occupied by humans. The bathroom light would click on in the morning. The shower would turn on, spraying an empty bathtub. No one lived in the house, but still the fridge would open and shut over the course of the day, and, every so often, the washer and dryer would starting rumble to life. TVs droned at empty rooms. At night the lights would come on throughout the home, waiting for a preset amount of time before shutting back down.

A total of three homes on the same suburban street were haunted by automated systems from 2009 through 2014. The goal of this collaboration between the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Electric Power Research Institute and Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) was to analyze the real-world impact of energy efficient construction and appliances. So the fridges, water heaters, washing machines, insulation and other features varied across the different homes.

The easy approach to testing those features might have been to recruit three families in the same neighborhood, and offered to outfit their homes from least to most energy efficient. Then, the project's team could compare the difference in their utility bills and resource usage over the course of the next six years. But the resulting data would have been corrupted by human factors—one family's preference for slightly higher indoor temperatures, or the total occupancy of the different homes changing, as kids go to college or an aging parent moves in. In this rigidly controlled study of human behavior, humans were the weak link.

(via)

Creepy ghost house full of robots also encouraging homelessness fuck you energy robots

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Finally, not just humans, a robot that will scare the shit out of some birds for once.

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FUCK. THIS.