She did an amazing job and is talented for sure.
I still absolutely hate those robots. This won't end well.
I still absolutely hate those robots. This won't end well.
Both here and anywhere else the Boston Dynamics robots are shown off, half of the comments always come back to the "scary robots" that will take your jobs and murder your family. I wish we could hit a big reset button on how the public at large perceives robots because I personally think that there is a lot of benefit to be harvested here, for the true benefit of mankind.
Question is... what are current goals of Boston Dynamics? Do they even see these robots used for non-military widely used scenarios - construction, medical care, first-responders etc? Are these things even possible for the things where cost is an important factor (unlike military, where cost is not that important)?
Care to expand on that? I'm very cynical about Boston Dynamics, given that - as far as I can tell / know - they've only done tech demos and again as far as I know don't have significant commercial success, or their robots doing things outside of (carefully orchestrated) tech demos.
disclaimer: I never actually looked on their website for user cases or whatnot.
SpaceX are using one because I think simply because someone thought it'd be cool. You can remotely inspect a launch pad without shelling out $75k+ using RC cars and drones, for example. It's much cooler and better for the company's overall image, though, if you use a Spot robot. PR is a thing after all and using Spot fits perfectly.
I seriously doubt there's any difficulty with safety or "being good enough", as I've yet to see an application for Spot that couldn't be done just as well by conventional already existing means.
BD is a group of enthusiasts that build cool robots, not a company that primarily develops robotic solutions.
however the real bugaboo begins when one is used wrong regardless of where that occurs. like facial recognition we are going to need some serious regulations on how law enforcement uses these. I don't expect issues with fire and rescue but they would get secured by the same laws.
As in, if they end up in use to secure assailants and there is an injury to that target or worse bystanders public reception will tank quickly. Let alone if robots ever got employed against protestors.
that perception will change radically regardless in the world where it happens because not all governments respect the rights of their citizens to the same degree and it becomes only a matter of time before abuse happens and its film.
on a side note, we certainly have enough movies and television presentation of the bad uses of robots; though most if cyborg type; to give people pause but will it give lawmakers pause?
Looking at what the US military has been doing with drones, that scenario doesn't seem that far fetched.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/8/12129348/dallas-shooting-b...
This scenario will remain science fiction until we invent a compact power source with an energy density (by both mass- and volume) matching fossil fuels.
The military has no use for loud and cumbersome petrol-powered monstrosities like Big Dog (which is why the project was axed) or underpowered robots with an endurance that's measured in minutes (like Spot) in combat scenarios.
Once such power source is available, though, the independence and versatility of a human in power armour would still be far superior to a remote controlled robot that can be hacked or have its comms jammed with COTS equipment...
Ah, its battery runs for 90 minutes.
Yep, and that's best case, too (e.g. not running Lidar or complex processing for autonomous function at the same time).
Minutes sounds a bit shorter than it is, but nevertheless anything with an endurance under 2 hours cannot run for hours pretty much by definition ;)
For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero (1980's Sweden overtaken by armed robots, including robot dogs).
Given the current state of these machines, both these environments would favour humans. Even a fairly untrained average Jane or Joe would have no problems outrunning these things in forests or urban environments, let alone a trained soldier. Not to mention the lack of autonomy.
Everything you see in these promotional videos is carefully choreographed, prepared and pre-programmed in advance for days, and edited:
"There were definitely some failures in the hardware that required maintenance, and our robots stumbled and fell down sometimes." - they shot the first part several times and kept the one that worked best. That's not something you can do in the field outside of a controlled environment.
These robots are still long ways away from posing more of a thread to a soldier than much simpler solution, e.g. a Humvee with a mounted machine gun.
> For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero
The game is based on fiction, not fact, though. The required autonomy just isn't there yet and the video game robots clearly run on magic, not electricity or petrol. They never overheat, they are maintenance free, and they move faster than is currently possible w.r.t. motion planning and image recognition.
It's your typical AM/FM affair: BD is actual machines - pre-programmed or remote controlled, very limited endurance and still impractical for most military applications.
The robots in video games and cinema on the other hand are for the most part in the domain of fucking magic - capable of "120 years of continuous operation on a single power cell" like the Cyberdyne Systems series 800 v2.4 (Terminator), turning themselves from "autonomous swords" into screaming humans (Screamers), are nearly indestructible like Vision (Marvel's Avengers) or strange spiky flying thingamabobs like the Sentinels (Matrix trilogy).
I guess I just struggle with understanding how this changes anything.
Perhaps they'd have a chance if they used a different form factor, though.
These robots know roughly where they are, what positions their limbs are in, how balanced they are, and what movement they should do next. That's about it. They cannot understand Asimov's three (*four) laws, or even a single sentence of English, and have no choice over their own actions as a whole.