What could go wrong?
Serco, laser toting robots, people already near death...
A Scottish hospital will become the first in the UK to use robots to clean, deliver food and dispense drugs. The Forth Valley Royal Hospital's fleet of bots will also be carrying clinical waste and cleaning operating theatres when the new £300m Stirlingshire hospital opens in August. The robot squad will move around via their …
"Staff will use hand-held PDA's to call the machines to move meal trays or bed linen"
By the time they've worked out which menu to get in to for the correct procedure - assuming the PDA has a charged battery - they might have well done it themselves.
Or, 'I press this and it cleans the floor, like so.'
"Fuck off - I'm off for a fag outside, if it's so urgent - you do it insted of sitting on your fat arse pretending to work"
In Scotland - a sh*tload of jobs. Local ones to boot, not Polish or Lithuanian. You are missing the point however.
This is a handout for the districts that voted right by our ex-New LieBore overlords.
The hospital trusts, police and everything else in districts that voted wrong like Camrbidge which had their LieBore MP ousted in favour of LibDem in the previous election (2005) had their budget slashed. After all who cares that Addenbrookes is one of the biggest teaching hospitals in the UK and that Papworth is one of the very few UK heart surgery centers. They voted for the wrong people. No budget for you, bad dog... Bad...
It is the same as the 2Bn spanking new hospitals planned for Mancunia, Tyneside and Leeds/Bradford Yorkshire. Handout. For doing the right thing. You gotta know whom you are voting for plebs...
Thankfully Conlibs have put at least some stop to that. There is however a long way (tens of billions) of such handouts yet to go.
I assume that these robots needn't be- because they're practically just glorified part-roomba-part-remote-control-toy hybrids. The fact that the doctors and nurses needed to use a PDA to control it pretty much reinforces that.
Beer- because it raises the hard question: if the robot kills a person, is it the fault of the robot or the person handling it?
Your investigative journalism skills seem to be lacking. You haven't even mentioned the potential threat to the human race brought about by these terrifying robo-dalek-doctors roaming hospital wards picking off the easier targets and sending them for processing aboard the mothership.
I assume these standby humans are there to administer robot maintenance rather patient relief and are all controlled by explosive cranial implant. Also, the Serco angle as servants of the Lizard Alliance!
"Dispensing drugs"? It is the responsibility of a Registered Nurse to dispense drugs, and to ensure that they are either taken by the correct patient in the correct dosage by the correct route at the correct time. How the hell is a robot going to do that? [Contemplatesleaving academia to go into practice, because the lawsuits will be plentiful, and lucrative!!]
As they can now fit a military laser in a plane, no doubt the Japanese will bring out a version that works better, fits in a suitcase and works off a small fuel cell. I guess after the next hardware upgrade the robots will no longer bother with opening doors but just cut a robot-plus-tray shaped hole.
No, they won't kill us all - not until they find a way to generate electricity themselves.