This is Yangyang. She’s what your mum would look like if you lived in Hong Kong. She looks like an Eastern version of Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie. If you put an assault rifle in her hands she’d be Sarah Palin. But in fact she’s a robot. Wow! A robot!

The latest in the ever-increasing push towards AI (that’s artificial intelligence, not the great north road) has come up with this… thing. And it looks friendly and nice, lacks the Terminator Cyborg menace, is (just) more aesthetically appealing than a Dalek, and can shake hands with people. And speak to them, in a limited way.

China and Japan, who actually managed to put aside their total hatred for each other just long enough to produce Yangyang, see ‘her’ as the future. Both countries have ageing populations and apparently suffer ‘growing labour shortages’. China, 1.6 billion people and they can’t find 150 factory workers. So they’re building them instead. Desperately installing all the robotics they can into the workforce. But can she handle a wok?

Meanwhile back on Planet Almost Human, Ed Miliband went to meet Russell Brand. Which some say is odd due to Brand being the leading anti-voting campaigner as well as all round obnoxious tosser and vile human being. But Ed thought he’d ‘court’ Brand to try and get him to support Labour. And to do this he chose the ‘come down to his level’ method of chumminess. Ed spent the hour dropping all his aitches, glottal stopping for all he’s worth (not a lot) and turning into the political equivalent of a Rude Boy gang-banger. Ed became ‘street’. Worked well too.

But Ed is now a desperate man. Scotland is voting SNP. All of it, apparently. So Ed will lose sufficient seats in the election, as previously Scotland was Labour, to force things to happen. Cameron will win most seats. But possibly not enough for an overall majority. Then Ed will have to do a deal with the Scots. Who all want to leave Britain. That’s what the SNP stands for. Scottish Nationalism. And Ed has repeatedly, unambiguously, constantly denied that he would ever do that.

Nicola Sturgeon meanwhile is so entrenched in the whole Scottish psyche that anyone questioning any of their policies is immediately seen as ‘anti-Scottish’, whatever the argument. Sigmund Freud once stated that anyone who questions pyscho-analysis has unresolved issues and needs psycho-analysis to overcome them. Perfect circularity. Sturgeon has taken a leaf from his pipe and made her party into one that cannot be questioned. Hitler did that too.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx