Boston Dynamics Atlas Humanoid Robot Doing Parkour [video + article]

spectrum.ieee.org

9 pointssamizdis3 comments

I'm not a particularly pessimistic person in general, but I don't know ...this tech, while cool, feels like the precursor to a worse future in general. Maybe I've seen too much sci-fi, but these robots look like optimizing for future soldiers, law enforcement etc. Given all the other Self-Driving / Facial Recognition / Loss of Privacy / Deepfake / "AI is bad at recognizing $situation"-type posts, and as all these techs converge I just feel melancholy, not optimistic. I feel like "AI Robot cops show implicit bias resulting in 3 deaths" or "Robot Cop shoots innocent person after facial recognition goes bad" or "Crowd Control Bots kill 55 in a peaceful protest" - type headlines are the future here.

There's no real need for AI. If you combine Atlas with VR controllers you could have the robots be in the danger zone while the human controllers sit in a safe and secure place. I'd say we're about a decade or two away from that, but I can see the potential.

(Additionally add Starship as a delivery mechanism and Starlink as a low-lag communication channel and you've got a "deploy a battalion of killbots at any place on the planet within 1 hour, with 0 risk for the operator-soldiers" pitch for a defence contract)

Anybody know what the Magic Stick is for, from the second video?

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