Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
THE LAB — One day, a mother walked down to her unfinished basement and found loads of garbage strewn across the floor and her 9-year-old son sitting in the chaos playing with trash. She wasn't happy about it and told that little boy he needed to clean up the mess, immediately.
That's how my mother would relate the story to you, but let me tell it from my side.
One day, I was working in my laboratory on my most important work to date. For weeks, I had been gathering materials to change mankind. I was building a robot. I had been meticulous about what kind of spray paint cans I had collected for the arms, tinfoil balls for the eyes and random wires for the vital innards that would make the robot come alive.
The door at the top of the stairs, which was the entrance to "the lab," cracked open and management came down and pulled funding on the project. The head honcho did not understand the genius of my work and decided my lab would convert to a space more in line with the company's new vision and direction: a storage area for old photo albums.
My robot was scrapped, and everything from its potential fingers (old toothpaste tubes) to its future brain (an old keyboard) ended up in the trash along with my dreams.
This trauma was revisited recently when I saw this video. This robot acts out prompts and does all the essential things humanity hoped a robot would do one day, like shred on the air guitar and pretend to be a ghost. The future is now, people.
Some may find the robot's movements unsettling or creepy and, to those people, I'd say, "You're absolutely right."
This robot is a nightmare factory.
That said, this video made me realize the R&D put into my robot may not have been as comprehensive as it needed to be and, ultimately, management — my mom — made the right call.
Have you seen this?
