The UN called for today a moratorium on Killer robots. According to a report, robots “should not have the power of life and death over human beings,” rather this should be decided by the sane humans that developed swords, gunpowder, chemical weapons, and an atom bomb.
Ironically earlier in the week a new 3-foot-long robot knows as Tlaloc II-TC discovered new rooms of human sacrifice in the Aztec temple of Quetzalcoati in Teotihuacan, Mexico (30 miles outside of Mexico City). This unique robot was able to wedge itself in to small tight spaces to discover three previously unknown burial chambers that are roughly 2,000 years old. “We managed to generate a series of images that allowed us to tentatively understand what is the configuration of the space at the end of the tunnel; and it seems that there’s not just one, as we predicted with Georadar, but three chambers,” Sergio Gómez, the team’s leader told the Mexican newspaper El Universal. “We have to correctly process the information, make much finer scans and measurements to see what it actually is,” Gómez added.
This is not the first time Gómez and his crew has used robots for exploration. In fact Tlaloc II-TC’s predecessor, Tlaloc I (the Aztec’s deity of rain) was first utilized in 2010. In addition, Archeologists have also made progress in the Valley of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, where they have unearthed signs of a specialized hierarchy of priests that may have been involved in human sacrifice (and they call robots monsters?).
This is another fine example of how robots are touching the lives, or in this case the remnants of life, in new and exciting ways. I guess the UN needs to go on a vacation to Mexico.
Image Credit CC: 500PX
