This is so sick. I agree that it’s a little lame that we have all these AI capabilities right now, robotics improving, and all we can think of making is humanoid robots. Like I want a spider/squid hybrid robot running around my house
> "Teddy," he said, "I'm going to pull up flowers from the flower bed.” "No Davy . . . pulling up flowers is naughty . . . don't pull up the flowers.” The little voice squeaked and the arms waved.
> "Teddy, I'm going to break a window.” "No, Davy . . . breaking windows is naughty . . . don't break any windows . . .” "Teddy, I'm going to kill a man.” Silence, just silence. Even the eyes and the arms were still.
> The roar of the gun broke the silence and blew a ruin of gears, wires and bent metal from the back of the destroyed teddy bear.
> "Teddy . . . oh, teddy . . . you should have told me," David said and dropped the gun and at last was crying.
What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology!
"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error fadedExpressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.
This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
This is adorable! I did some research on tentacle robots last year. The official term is “continuum robots” and there’s actually a great deal of research into their development due to their usefulness in medical robotics. This lecture is a great overview for the curious:
https://youtu.be/4ktr10H04ak
"ah, you hesitated" no more so than on every single other question.
the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.
also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
Beautiful work! I appreciate how this robot clearly does NOT try to look like any natural creature. I don't want a future where we can't easily distinguish nature from robotics. So far humanoid robots look clearly robotic too: hope that trend continues.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadJust basic interactions with a child plus lessons and a voice would be game changing for the toy world.
> "Teddy, I'm going to break a window.” "No, Davy . . . breaking windows is naughty . . . don't break any windows . . .” "Teddy, I'm going to kill a man.” Silence, just silence. Even the eyes and the arms were still.
> The roar of the gun broke the silence and blew a ruin of gears, wires and bent metal from the back of the destroyed teddy bear.
> "Teddy . . . oh, teddy . . . you should have told me," David said and dropped the gun and at last was crying.
"One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on something else: unpredictability, a certain opacity. This makes sense: living systems track a messy, high-dimensional world. Shoggoth Mini doesn’t.
This raises a question: do we actually want to build robots that feel alive? Or is there a threshold, somewhere past expressiveness, where the system becomes too agentic, too unpredictable to stay comfortable around humans?"
the delay for the GPT to process a response is very unnerving. I find it worse than when the news is interviewing a remote site with a delay between responses. maybe if the eyes had LEDs to indicate activity rather than it just sitting there??? waiting for a GPT to do its thing is always going to force a delay especially when pushing the request to the cloud for a response.
also, "GPT-4o continuously listens to speech through the audio stream," is going to be problematic
Also was thinking of Oogie Boogie Tim Burton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ2dI_B_Ycg