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Comment by pianopatrick | Hacker News Reader

Ya know, maybe we could just not have robots that sprint. Seems people would be more willing to accept living amongst robots that are slow and that humans could easily over power.

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If you're talking human size bipeds, if they have the required peak torques and speeds on the leg actuators to work at all, they will have the physical ability to sprint. You can think of a Segway to visualize this more easily - the motor on it needs quite a bit of power and speed to overcome a human leaning forward drastically without just falling over, a biped is the same thing with more steps. You need quite a lot of power to even idle stand a biped and a lot of speed to even do tiny corrections. If you want to rely on an ifElse statement or a model policy to not sprint, then you just introduce more likelihood of falling over, which also isn't great around humans. If you truly want to know a robot will not (meaning cannot) sprint, you would need form factors like a worm or centipede.

Sprinting requires significantly different physical form than just bigger motors. I do not accept the claim that humans couldn't possibly make bipedal robots that can reliably walk without being able to sprint. That's absurd.

> maybe we could just not have robots that sprint

That would make it less effective in situations that would be better handled if sprinting was a feature.

Thinking about that - seems to me that a lot of situations where sprinting is called for might be better served by a flying robot.

We already have flying drones. And giving ground robots the ability to fly requires the resolution of a set of constraints that'd likely make them far less suitable for their primary task. For example, they'd need to be far lighter, which means less durability and they'd be more bulky with flying equipment, so they wouldn't fit in places that before they had no issue fitting. There's a reason humans didn't evolve wings.

In daily life, it's rarely wise to be running. In industrial settings less so.

So it might be a good idea to kneecap household robots in that respect.

If it's already feasible, better to have the capability and not need it, rather than need it and not have it.

This is how regulation will look someday.

Humans are slower and weaker than much of the megafauna we drove to extinction all over the world.

Yes, but we were smarter. We may not have the same result against things that are stronger, faster and smarter.

Personally, I think the test for "how safe is Artificial Intelligence" is not how Intelligent it is, but instead how Artificial it is.

Servers in data centers are not that dangerous to people in the physical world. Robots that are smarter, faster and stronger might be.

My point was that even with AI driven robots being weaker and slower, they can still kill us, if they are smart enough.

> Servers in data centers are not that dangerous to people in the physical world.

A stroke of a pen is plenty dangerous in the physical world.

Megafauna did not have steel skin and could bleed

Humans do not have steel skin and can bleed.

Yeah, I keep saying, put them on treads. That's how you'll be able to deliver even to the most unwilling customers.

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