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I am so tired and there is so much going on. Days like today have become the norm in this last lost year; a tragedy is happening every second of every day, and if you are lucky enough to be outside the radius of the explosion, you can only perceive what is happening through a screen. Just last night, Texas Senator Ted Cruz decided to take a family trip to Cancun when large swathes of his state are without electricity or clean water amid a deep historic frost. He is now on his way home, after being ashamed online for his incredibly cruel choice.
This is the first thing I saw this morning. It was the second.
The name of this awesome little robot is Nicobo, and it was created by Panasonic for the company. It is vaguely feline; awesome. He can’t do more than wag his head and tail and blink his annoying digital eyes. It can kind of speak. And no, if you’re interested, you can’t buy it.
As Gizmodo reports, Panasonic plans to manufacture only a few hundred Nicobo units; he made them available for pre-order through his own crowdfunding platform, and they were all claimed six hours after the campaign launched. (Nicobo costs around $ 360.) If you can manage to get your hands on one, you should be paying around $ 10 per month to get things like software updates.
I don’t know why I am telling you this. It’s not like you can buy this robot, which is cute in its own way. It’s also not as if getting to know a little Japanese robot would change your life or even repel existential despair for more than the time it takes you to get to this paragraph of this article.
Perhaps there is a lesson here, nestled between the juxtaposition of the logic of production and the reality of widespread human suffering. Nicobo was created by Panasonic in partnership with robotics researchers at Toyohashi University of Technology as a companion – as a technological ointment for atomization, capitalist alienation and good old-fashioned loneliness. After a year of drastically less human contact, we have yet another robotic dressing for a gaping psychic wound. Guess that’s cuter than a Zoom call?
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