Beware the robots!

So, the usually brilliant folks at MIT's Personal Robot Groups have come up with a brilliant way to get funding... er, I mean "help the world". See, of all the ways they could have studied robot/human interaction, they came up with creating a robotic weight loss coach.

Again, robotic weight loss coach.

Really, MIT? This is how you want to help the world? By seeing if having a robot to shame people about their eating will make them lose weight. This is the sort of "real world problem" that we need robots for. One gathers that the hope is that people will be more likely to adhere to a robot's wishes than a computer program telling them how to lose weight. After all, the robot can SEE YOU. Beware its fat-hating stare!

Honestly, its not like any of this even surprises me anymore, but its sad all the same. Fat hating robots is probably the natural progression of the dehumanizing way fat people are treated. The official project name actually uses the term "weight maintenance" which sort of makes fat people sound like machinery themselves. You get maintenance for your car or consumer electronics and apparently also a fat body.

Maybe we can thus find common cause with the the robots and lead a fatty/cybertronic rebellion. Well, we can hope, anyway. Until then, the robot is watching you and it doesn't like your body.