Magic Robot Pants! Sounds great, doesn't it? They read your brain's signals for your legs to walk through sensors on your skin, and walk for you, helping the old and disabled. According to the article, they have a promotional video showing the magic robot pants getting a partially paralyzed person up out of a chair and walking across the room. YAY.
Except, oh wait... "Cyberdyne, a new company in Tsukuba outside Tokyo..."
As Wikipedia so helpfully explains,
"As depicted in the films The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Cyberdyne is initially a benign manufacturing corporation in Sunnyvale, California. After a T-800 series Terminator, Cyberdyne Systems Model 101-- a cyborg from the future, designed to kill humans -- is crushed in one of the company's hydraulic presses, the company secretly begins manufacturing technological devices based on reverse engineering the Terminator's remains. Cyberdyne reverse-engineers the recovered CPU from the destroyed cyborg and creates a powerful new microprocessor for weapons systems, becoming a major contractor for the US military."
Just where did these Japanese scientists get the circuit models and ideas for their magic pants? And is this going to become some kind of Wallace and Grommit meets The Terminator scenario? I don't know, some how I'm finding homicidal robot pants less menacing than a leather-clad governor of California armed with a shotgun. Still, my inner geek is telling me "Danger! Danger!"
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