This week on the RTSF podcast, I talk to Elizabeth bear about her amazing book, Tideline.

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Halloween is here and I'm sure many of you are going to be wanting to snuggle up in a dark room to watch a scary movie. If you're fresh out of ideas on what to watch, I've rounded up the top 5 scary robot movies that will be perfect for a Halloween scare-fest!

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I Am Mother is the Hilary Swank-Rose Byrne movie streaming on Netflix, where a robot, named Mother (Rose Byrne), raises a girl, appropriately named Daughter, as part of a plan to repopulate the Earth after an extinction event. Or maybe not, once a survivor (Hilary Swank) shows up and starts challenging some of the fundamental assumptions. While it is neither a great scifi movie nor a bad one, it is a good way to jump start thinking about physical human-robot interaction, also known as Physical HRI.

The Robotics Through Science Fiction podcast returns! Today we're joined by the wonderful Daniel Suarez

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Drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS), are in the news this week with the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil production facilities. Ever since the CIA weaponized Predators in 2002 the conversation has typically been about killer drones remotely piloted by soldiers as part of a government’s military operations. There’s a summary of history at understandingempire.wordpress.com and you can go to io9 for a clever 5 minute video about how CIA weaponized drones and the computer vision  involved gizmodo.com. In 2014 the United Nations held a Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Meeting of Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems in 2014 to discuss killer robots www.un.org, focusing on getting governments to sign off. But as the Saudi Arabia attacks highlight, weaponized drones are becoming available to non-state actors (yes, it appears the ones in Saudi Arabia were launched from Iran or Iraq, but Hamas has been using inex...

Recommendation: Read Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach for the excellent ideas, great story, and compelling characters but pay attention to the drones too.

Read Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach today by ordering with Amazon, just follow the link below:

The kids are out of school and the days are long and hot, so it’s the perfect time to pop in a movie a the robot is a main character and stay up a wee bit late. This slide show explores G or PG rated robot movies with teachable moments that the little ones might enjoy as well as the parents.

Happy Father's Day 2019!