(Photo: Trendhunter.com)

Are there any flesh and blood female human beings in the country of Japan that serve as actual girlfriends? There must be, but they certainly aren't getting much facetime on the Internet. Everywhere we turn, it seems, something inanimate is being manufactured, uploaded to the Internet with breathless excitement and automatically labeled a "girlfriend."

Here, take a stroll with us as we meet the girlfriends of Japan.

1. A disembodied mannequin robot head plucked from your nightmares that tells you if your breath stinks. (Hint: if this thing's your "girlfriend," it does.)

2. A rendering of a lady on a Nintendo DS that you bring to your wedding when marrying your actual girlfriend.

3. Really any anime girl capable of being loaded onto a TV or computer screen. Bonus points if you can pause it on a frame where it looks like she's eating, and then pretend to feed her real food.

4. A Domino's pizza app endorsed by Mr. Domino's himself.

5. Vending machines that sell "used school girl panties."

6. An eerily lifelike looking robot that spends her days emailing you love letters.

7. A not-at-all lifelike looking robot that actually just looks like a shitty transformer (hot).

8. A Nintendo DS video game named "Love Plus."

9. A fucking coat that will whisper in your ear, presumably telling you it's not weird at all to be in love with a coat.

10. And of course, a body pillow.

SHIT! (screencap, annotated by Betabeat)

Does the prospect of Skynet keep you awake at night? Well, now there's something you can do to fight your fears, besides chucking your Sarah Connor Chronicles DVDs. The BBC reports that yesterday, the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots officially launched in London.

The group is exactly what it sounds like. Founded by reps from nine different NGOs, including the Human Rights Watch, International Committee for Robot Arms Control and Nobel Women’s Initiative, the campaign wants a "pre-emptive and comprehensive ban" on fully autonomous weapons.

Building on a report released last fall, leaders are calling for an international treaty, plus national laws as needed.

The group's leader Jody Williams was upbeat about their prospects in an interview with the BBC, predicting that people will "flock" to the cause. She said:

"The public conscience is horrified to learn about this possible advance in weapons systems. People don't want killer robots out there. Normal human beings find it repulsive."

Bear in mind that the U.K. government has said it's got no intention of developing such weapons. Of course, that's what the government would say, isn't it?

(Photo: Dragon Painting)

The Huffington Post and YouGov collaborated on a very important poll of 1,000 U.S. adults meant to measure the attitudes of Americans towards robots. The results are pretty typical, except for one thing: turns out Americans aren't really that into doing robots (or they're lying).

Come on guys, live a little.

HuffPo writes:

58 percent of Americans said that robots will be cleaning our homes by 2030. But only 33 percent said that they'd like a robot servant.... (22 percent) said that they would let a robot care for an aging friend or relative....Forty-eight percent of respondents indicated that they believed robots will be able to fight in the military by 2030.

But when it comes to intimacy, Lieutenant Data and his ilk might be better off bonding with fellow non-humans (or animals). According to the poll, only 9 percent of Americans said they would "have sex with a robot if they could."

Guess you guys won't be having longevity orgasms anytime soon.

They even got Jean-Luc!

Now that Google Glass has officially established itself as the newest buzzy gadget, a backlash is brewing, uniting the technophobic and privacy-obsessed to form an anti-cyborg movement.

A new site, called "Stop the Cyborgs," wants to help organize those who want to "save humanity from the cyber collective." They see Google Glass less like a cool way to livestream footage of yourself sky diving and more like the beginning of a violent Borg-like empire. Sorry, Sergey!

The creators also call Google Glasses’ ability to seamlessly record footage (without ever notifying the subject) a major threat to privacy. Can't really blame them there. We're also uneasy about mainstreaming creepshots!

But the campaigners take their rhetoric a step further, warning of "serious consequences" for humanity as we lose our ability to distinguish between the digital and the real:

"People will make decisions and interact with other humans in the real world in a way which increasingly depends on information that Google Glass tells them."

In the end, all that's left is a Philip K. Dick-style dystopia:

"Gradually people will stop acting as autonomous individuals, when making decisions and interacting with others, and instead become mere sensor/effector nodes of a global network. There will be no room for multiple identities, hypocrisy or experimentation. There will be no space in which you can escape your online profile and the system will be controlled by a small group of corporations."

Scared shitless yet? Good: The organization has a few recommendations for things you can do now to push back against the borg threat of tomorrow.

Start by making your property a "surveillance device free zone," like that bar in Seattle. They've even provided a sign for you to print off! You could also write your Congressman, start a consciousness-raising group or, if you're liberal artsy, "think about how you could approach the issue in art."

Then again, maybe all this alarmism is just a touch overblown. Nestled amid the fear-mongering is a disclaimer: "Please note that Google has not yet officially released the details of how Google Glass will work so the above is educated speculation based on public press articles."

At any rate, the backlash-to-the-backlash should start any day now, so go ahead and cyber-squat on any domains relevant to human rights activism while we're still human.

(h/t DVice)

Robot surgeons are generally less sexy than regular surgeons. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Robots are frequently relied on in the medical community to perform complex, invasive surgeries that require a dexterous touch. But like any person (or thing!) with a medical degree, robots are now become the target of lawsuits launched by their former patients.

Bad Robot Surgery is a place for people who have had surgery performed by a Da Vinci Robot to congregate. The Da Vinci is designed to use a minimally invasive procedure to perform minor procedures like hysterectomies or cardiac valve repair. But just because the human error factor is nonexistent doesn't mean you're in the clear. Dr. Francois Blaudeau is an Alabama-based lawyer (with a medical degree!) who is fighting for the rights of victims of robot surgery.

"We are committed to helping victims of robot surgery receive the medical care and compensation they deserve," reads the site. "Additionally, we are committed to educating patients and doctors throughout the nation about the complications associated with robot surgery."

A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that robot surgery is not more or less dangerous than that performed by human surgeons, but it can take longer and be more expensive. But let's not say anything we regret and anger the robots...

(Photo: Cleverbot)

Look out, Hollywood screenwriters: the robots are coming for your jobs, too.

Cleverbot is an artificial intelligence robot that Internet users can converse with and, more frequently, troll until it says funny stuff. But one filmmaker, Chris Wilson, saw the creative potential in Cleverbot and decided to co-write a short film with it. It might just be the first movie written by a machine.

Mr. Wilson chatted back and forth with Cleverbot in order to tease out the dialogue for the script. Some of the character names also came from Cleverbot--the lead is called "Stomach," for instance, 'cuz Cleverbot is sassy like that. The title of the short, "Do You Love Me?", also came from the surprisingly emo mind of Cleverbot.

As smart as Cleverbot is, though, it's gleefully unaware that it co-wrote a movie. "Your movie is great!" we told it. "Get your hand off my mouth?" it responded. Okay then.

(h/t Laughing Squid)

Don't look so innocent, parrot. (Photo: screencap)

Andrew Gray, computer engineering grad student at the University of Florida couldn't get his parrot, Pepper, to shut up. Pepper would scream whenever he found himself alone in a room. So, as ABC News reports, Mr. Gray built his pet a little robotic buggy, controlled via a little joystick that Pepper pilots with his beak.

It is not immediately clear why Pepper could not just fly to where the humans were.  

Mr. Gray told ABC News that, “It was just an experiment that will maybe get me a job down the road.”

Just don't be surprised when the parrots go all Planet of the Apes on us, Mr. Gray.

"GUYS, I've got a GREAT idea."

The U.S. Navy has a big job, monitoring all seven of the seas. (There are seven, right?) In fact, short of a clone army of incredible Mr. Limpets, there's no easy way to distribute resources so they can respond quickly to possible regional flare-ups. And so DARPA's latest, greatest idea for the waterborne branch of the armed forces, Popular Science reports, is the "Upward Falling Payloads" program, which:

seeks to create technologies that would allow the Navy to leave unmanned systems and other distributed technologies hidden in the ocean depths for years on end and deploy them remotely at the push of a button when the need arises.  

That sounds pretty futuristic, but it also faintly rings a bell. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, right: It's basically War of the Worlds: Ocean Edition. Here's how Steven Spielberg's 2005 version of the story opened:

Ray reaches the place where multiple lighting bolts struck the ground and witnesses the ground heaving up as a massive machine with three long legs climbs out. The Tripod gives off a loud blaring sound before opening fire with heat-rays, vaporizing bystanders and destroying everything in its path.

You might also recognize the theme of "robots chilling out under the sea" from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

However, before anyone gets too creeped out, DARPA doesn't want weapon systems, which you can't just leave lying around unattended on the ocean floor in potential war zones, because other countries will just snatch them up. They're thinking more along the lines of surveillance.

We wonder what percentage of DARPA's annual "research" budget goes to purchase new titles for the office video library.

(Photo: Rachel Marone)

It's no secret that Betabeat is a big fan of the stranger side of futurism, but we would not advise avoiding minimal routine surgery just because of the Singularity. A Redditor named imememine posted to r/Futurology wondering if he should skip having his hemorrhoids removed since in a few decades we'll all be transported to cyborg bodies, anyway.

"Does it make sense to get minor surgery right now when in few decades we could migrate to cyborgs bodies?" he asked, adding, "I am trying to decide whether or not to have hemorrhoids removed. No, I am not joking."

Luckily, r/Futurology's rationalists prevailed, warning the Redditor that yes, we might have cyborg bodies in 30 years, but we also might not. (There, there.) Plus, "a few decades," is kiiind of a long time to go around ignoring your hemorrhoids.

(Photo: Batdoc)

Ah, the medical professional fantasy: pretty mundane fodder for a generation reared on porn, but still immensely popular. Bedding a nurse is the number one fantasy among men, in case you haven't been to a Halloween party in the past 25 years.

Now, some futurists are predicting that robots will have a dual function in our impending utopian society: not only will they care for us when we're sick, but they'll also satisfy our sexual fantasies in the process.

Transhumanity.net predicts that medical robots will eventually come equipped with a program that allows them to use sex as a perk to help them stand out in the crowded marketplace. Why hire a doctor robot when you can hire a doctor robot with BOOBS?

Imagine this, dudes. Your doctor who attends to your rectal health is a curvy she’bot who straps you face down with your legs spread for a prostrate exam and colonoscopy. After freshening the air with lime spray from her nipples, she divinely massages you, before gliding her slippery 18-inch techno-tongue into your anus.

The nurse would eventually bring the patient to orgasm--mostly for medical reasons, of course! First longevity orgasms and now sexy doctor robots? No wonder transhumanists are so in love with the future. Though we have to admit, this whole thing sounds like it's rooted more in personal fantasy than scientific research.

It seems we may have a long way to go before we reach sexy nurses, though. The current iteration of robot nurses looks more like a cuddly teddy bear than something you'd want to let touch your intimate parts:

(Photo: CNET)