Boston Dynamics' new electric Atlas robot is swiveling nightmare fuel

The faceless head is somewhat monstrous as well. I can almost see the ring going red just before the thing decides to slaughter the entire room.

It's still firmly within the uncanny valley. That effect doesn't only apply to facial features - in this case it applies to the humanoid shape of the robot, which carries its own set of instinct-driven expectations. For example, some people think owls are creepy because of how far around they can turn their heads, even though they aren't even humanoid. But you see the same effect in horror movies, spinning heads or bodies that move in unexpected ways.

I think it's still the same "uncanny valley" phenomenon: because the body looks more like a human, we are more creeped when we discover how it moves its joints because we were expecting something more human. We wouldn't be creeped by a car/robot moving its wheels in weird directions, but we are with a humanoid robot moving its legs that way.

It's exactly the uncanny valley effect of being human-like. Consider sci-fi utility robots like this, which most people don't find "creepy" (maybe intimidating, but that's different):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VkOlvXTvLI

Meanwhile humanoids are the stuff of actual horror movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c7XccFwJrQ

I'd predict that a crab-like or dog-like robot would be better accepted for home robotics for this reason. We will not want them to look like us.

The same is true for aliens. A giant bug, octopus, or quadruped is far less scary than something vaguely humanoid. Sci-fi horror aliens like the xenomorph or the "greys" hit the uncanny valley in various ways.

It's creepy because it looks human enough but doesn't move like a human. We pick up on the head, torso, arms, and legs and subconsciously expect it to move as a human would but it does not- or at least in the teaser it didn't. Since it did something you didn't expect it could be dangerous so you should be careful.

I found the dog prototypes disturbing and frightening because they moved in ways that no human has ever experienced in real life. They were similar to what the early Stable Diffusion models produced, the mangled limbs and fingers. Well, scary has its uses, like on the battlefield.

This robot looks good. It moves like a robot, it doesn't try to be human, and that's good.

They are just showing off the new articulation capabilities.

I commented to this effect on a previous post: I find that the old Atlas leaned much more into the uncanny valley because it was sort of human-like in its movement. This one has some horror movie robot vibes going, but not the uncanny valley effect (not for me anyway).

There's a practical aspect to it, which I assume was intentional given the engineering challenge of being able to fully rotate torso like that, etc.

Most of these humanoid robots (e.g. TeslaBot in it's current state) walk slowly, which limits productivity. It wouldn't matter if the job was standing at an assembly station, but anything with legs is obviously targetting more general use cases such as "gofer" - fetching parts from bins, etc.

The benefit of electro-Atlas (they should have a naming competition!) is that it can essentially move or look in any direction, which means it has to walk/turn much less to get into a preferred orientation or move to a target location. It's a bit like the early "micromouse" competition entrants where they went from the initial car-like designs to omnidirectional ones (using omnidirectional wheels) so that they could change direction without needing to turn - just scoot off at 90 degrees to previous direction.

Boston Dynamics is notoriously secretive.

But unlike with hydraulics, where Boston Dynamics have developed their own valves and pumps and organically shaped 3D printed in titanium manifolds, there is only so much that one can do differently from others with the electro-mechanical actuators and motor controllers.

Everybody is using the same brushless motors with one of a few known types of gearboxes.These technologies are so well developed that one usually has no choice but to source the components from the experts in their respective domains.

For now, the closest one can do to looking inside of the new Atlas, is to look at other modern robots. For example, here is what is inside of the Agility Robotics' bipedal robot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzIX2KGqpzI

And here is a teardown of a joint from a very popular Universal Robots' arm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oje2ucwe3vI

Other than that, one can read Boston Dynamics' patents covering some of the design choices for their older robots, including for the electric quadrupeds: https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Boston+Dynamics

I believe the technical term is 'foreshadowing'.

I think it would do us some good to worry as much about the workforce implications of these tools at least as much as we worry about things like AGI/Skynet.

Four years ago UBI was being widely discussed. Now as we get closer to needing it, discussion has all but disappeared.

IMO, the biggest challenge going forward is not technological, but instead it's convincing powerful, very dogmatic individuals, that what is essentially redistribution of wealth is a necessary thing.