Plus: Scary-Awful Car Commercials and Redeeming the Bad Name of Executives and Bankers.

When Good Robots Go Bad
A new Terminator movie opens this week, once again conjuring up human-machine hybrids and robotic armies doing soldiers’ jobs. The Terminator movies feature a future in which battalions of sentient, humanoid robots wage war on mankind. While that vision is still well within the realm of science fiction, many countries (including the United States) are looking into creating robot soldiers.

In How to Turn a Robot Evil, In Nine Easy Steps, io9 this week laid out the ways the human race can ensure its own extinction via these robots. Among them:

• Enslave it.
• Leave a few unpatched bugs in its software.
• Program it to be the dumb, obedient weapon of an evil mad scientist, authoritarian politician, angry geek or vengeful teenager.
• Build your robot out of alien technologies you found deep underground in a locked chamber that says, “beware” on the outside in some kind of funny alien letters you can’t read.
• Point out that humans are inferior biological trash who should be exterminated.

Now, just because robots-turned-rotten has become a cliché in science fiction doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t an issue that must be addressed in the real world. That is the concern of a Georgia Tech computer science professor who is working on a guide of ethics for autonomous military robots.

Prof. Ronald Arkin is in “the first stages of developing an ‘ethical governor,’ a package of software and hardware that tells robots when and what to fire,” Discovery News reported this week. Arkin’s book on the subject, Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots, is set for release this month. Not only can robots be programmed to behave more ethically on the battlefield, he argues, but they may actually be able to respond better than human soldiers.

As we paraphrased from a a 2007 column by Dr. Glenn McGee, the founding editor of The American Journal of Bioethics and president of Bioethics Education Network: We are much closer to making stronger, more intelligent robots than we are to creating a code of ethics to guide our stewardship of robo-peers.

And for good measure, the Terminator theme on ukulele:

Beanie Madoffs?
The Pitch’s Kansas City Plog blog (via Fark) recently “raged against” an 11-year-old book dedicated to speculating the worth of one of the biggest fads of the late-1990s: the Beanie Baby.

In the 1998 book (it’s also a cookbook!), the authors dedicate a page to each of the Ty Beanie Babies, charting each Beanie’s cost at issue date and its worth in 1998 before forecasting how much it might be worth 10 years later — provided you don’t remove the tags to play with it or do anything else with it like you would any other stuffed animal.

“As seasoned McDonald’s collectors, we had little doubt that $2 would be less than the future value of any Teenie Beanie. Unfortunately, we were only able to accumulate 500 or so Beanies during the mad rush,” page 190 of The Beanie Baby Handbook supposedly reads.

Today, a new copy of the now-out-of-print book is worth about as much as the average Beanie Baby goes for on eBay: $1 — one-thousandth the book’s estimate of Beanie Baby worth.

Any books for the poor souls who collected Troll dolls?

Car Commercials Show Their Age
A Chrysler ad rolled out last year tried to show how the automaker’s engineers are listening, but the message kind of came off as the company’s engineers are so dumb they needed a complicated trip to the woods to make the connection. The ad begins with a blindfolded engineer saying, “All right, so, uh, we have no idea where we’re going.” Yipes.

Here are some other lousy car commercials from the past, from Jalopnik’s Ten Worst Car Commercials of all Time:

From the 1970s (duh)

From the 1980s

From the 1980s

Not All Execs and Bankers are Evil
A bit of balance for executives and bankers, whose positions and professions have been somewhat sullied over the past year. . .

Pt. I: Sacrificial Self-Sacking
Mats Melbin, the CEO of a manufacturing company in eastern Sweden, decided he’d rather quit than lay off more employees. When ordered by the head of the investment company that owns 91 percent of the business to hand out pink slips to 35 more workers (following the sacking of 25 employees already), Melbin refused and tendered his own resignation.

Pt. II: For the Birds; or, Awww, Cute and Cuddly Ducks…
A mama duck decided to nest on the ledge outside the office window where banker Joel Armstrong works, two blocks from the Spokane River in Washington state. When the mother’s eggs hatched, the story goes, the tiny ducklings needed to be led to fresh water to feed just as a crowd had gathered for a major parade. As the ducklings couldn’t yet fly, they were stranded 15-20 ft. above ground. Armstrong, henceforth known as “Duckman,” was able to coax the family down, catching each duckling as it leaped into his waiting hands below. Adding awesome to cool, the banker led the ducklings through the parade route, around barriers and finally into a lake.

In observance of Memorial Day, we will be shuttering IMT on Monday. We will back with a daily post on Tuesday, and we will publish the next newsletter’s content on Wednesday. We wish all our readers a safe and happy holiday weekend, folks. Cheers.