Does anyone else feel creeped out by these robots? Put a flamethrower on and some intelligence into Spot, and have the intelligence decide that humans are bad.
It's just a walking robot. Drones have been here for a lot longer and already carry deadly weapons. Following your logic, you should've been scared and running for years already.
Indeed; further, if we actually wanted something that could climb into your house and shoot you remotely without expending human life—we could have just stuck a turret to a cellphone to a police dog.
Robots are scary only because they allow for ubiquitous drone warfare—millions of drones just clogging the streets, or maybe small enough to hide in the shadows like stray pets. For targeted drone warfare, though, we've already had the technology for a long, long time.
Police departments already use robots with cameras and guns. But because they're small and have tank treads rather than legs no one seems worried about them.
Oh, the robot did it. Great, like that is going to make it all okay. Fuck, drones have already allowed those in charge to excuse themselves from bad choices, now who are we going to blame? The programmer or the robot? I guess whomever ever has the least protection under the law, the robot certainly won't care
Halfway through the movie, when suddenly there are two of them, now this was creepy to me... like if the first one suddenly cloned effortlessly... and now both are happily hopping along, never tired, we're just harmless, funny guys, you know, your best friends!... <shudder>
Less scary than an automated or remote-controlled drone shooting a missile from a few kilometers away TBH. Easier to kill, too. Probably a lot cheaper to produce, too. And more effective.
Looks similar to what's on top of Google's self-driving cars. I didn't really imagine that much integration between Boston Dynamics and the rest of Google, but perhaps this is a sign that the two groups have joined (or are at least working together).
I don't think the use of LiDAR indicates any connection to the car group. You can pick up a Neato robot vacuum at Wal-Mart for $100 with a spinning LiDAR on top, and that's been on store shelves since before Google acquired their first self-driving car team. It's just the go-to sensor for mapping your surroundings in near-realtime.
It looks like a Velodyne HDL-32 [1] LiDAR unit. Broadly speaking, it pulses a bunch of lasers (32 in this case) really fast and measures the response time of each beam; think hyper-focused radar. The resulting point cloud can be used to build a high res map of its surroundings essentially in realtime.
I wonder why it's obscured so much by what looks like protective housing in some shots. I also wonder how much of its navigation it's actually doing, as opposed to being remote controlled.
Didn't Google announce that they won't be taking any more DARPA contracts in the future? People were reading into that and suggesting that they were moving away from all military hardware all together.
Does that mean Google will not SELL those robots to the army?
DARPA only FUNDED THE R&D for most robots from them. DARPA is a funcding organization for military research projects: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The real customers then will be military, police, homeland security and agencies active in special operations (CIA, ...).
From their homepage:
> Organizations worldwide, from DARPA, the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps to Sony Corporation turn to Boston Dynamics for advice and for help creating the most advanced robots on Earth.
So US Army, Navy and the Marine Corps are already giving money to Google for military robotics projects.
Military use isn't as big a market as you think it is. iRobot is the largest supplier of robots to the US military but military sales only account for 10% of its revenue.
Yeah, that's defense and security. We know that they make money there.
iRobot makes most of their money right now with automated cleaning systems. Just look at their recent financial statement. But that's an offering which Google / Boston Dynamics does not have.
I believe it still runs on diesel. It seems like they wanted to solve all the other issues before moving on to making things quieter and smaller. If you look at the latest ATLAS iteration it is also quieter.
Hit it with a car. Can it get up if knocked over? Fall down a stairs and get up? Can it walk on three legs? Just how resilient is it? I am impressed what it can do in the video but I would love to see how it recovers from other than very tame issues
> I would love to see how it recovers from other than very tame issues
You do know that these things don't pop out of the universe via magic right? Do you understand the engineering issues involved here to be judging the tameness of the tests? Why would they hit their expensive creation with a car?
Ok, it's time for another (perhaps timely and relevant) debate about whether AI is going to destroy us or if The Robots are going to take over.
Let me point to a great, great essay and debate that lays out lots of these arguments, and points out the fundamental mistakes that are being made when people bring up the fear over AI. Here is the most relevant quote, for me:
"let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything. Here I want to suggest a simple thought experiment of my own. There are so many technologies I could use for this, but just for a random one, let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.
I'm going to give you two scenarios. In one scenario, there's suddenly a bunch of these, and some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly. There's so many of them that it's hard to find all of them to shut it down, and there keep on being more and more of them. That's one scenario; it's a pretty ugly scenario.
There's another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people. The question is, does it make any difference which it is?
The truth is that the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality. It's the fact that there's this little killer drone thing that's coming around. It's not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI, or even, for that matter, if there's enough of them, it could just be an utterly random process. The whole AI thing, in a sense, distracts us from what the real problem would be. The AI component would be only ambiguously there and of little importance.
This notion of attacking the problem on the level of some sort of autonomy algorithm, instead of on the actuator level is totally misdirected. This is where it becomes a policy issue. The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate. And maybe that problem will never take place anyway. What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative. There isn't an AI algorithm that's good enough to do that for the time being. An equivalent problem can come about, whether or not the AI algorithm happens. In a sense, it's a massive misdirection.
This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it. There are about to be a whole bunch of those. And that'll involve some kind of new societal structure that isn't perfect anarchy. Nobody in the tech world wants to face that, so we lose ourselves in these fantasies of AI. But if you could somehow prevent AI from ever happening, it would have nothing to do with the actual problem that we fear, and that's the sad thing, the difficult thing we have to face."
What I really fear is not that the AI will take a control and starts to kill humans. I fear that we will trust AI to the point that when it will tell us to kill each other and we will follow.
Let AI decide whether to use solar enery or coal and when to switch. Let human decide about other human.
AI should be our compass on a starless night, not the captain.
I do not think this would be a good idea.
Firstly because of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Secondly because if we will see robots as livin beings (either consciously or subconsciously), we will associate emotions with their existance. I fail to see any benefits that can come from this. Just imagine movements spawning all over the world that will fight for robots freedom and rights to vote.
Uncanny Valley doesn't apply. It would apply if they put a skin-and-fur-like shell over the body and tried to give it a life-like head, with eyes, nose, mouth and tongue, and it looked almost perfect, but not quite good enough to pass as the real thing; just enough to make it seem off the mark somehow. A white plastic shell hardly comes close; it would just provide a more attractive veneer.
I'm pretty sure that putting a white plastic shell over those robots will make them less uncanny - by the very virtue of looking like crap. Seriously, all those "androids" that are fashionable now, made of white plastic and with weird faces, look just ugly. I'm unable to connect emotionally to them the way I easily can with Big Dog of Spot.
Aww, I really feel bad for the robot when he gets kicked, more so because this model is so small. And the animal-like stabilization motions don't help either. Great work by Boston Dynamics
Oddly enough I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the robot getting kicked back and forth there. I know you want to demonstrate how stable it is, but damn guys, no need to be so cruel!
yes, and hopefully, 10 years down the line it is not merged with an ai which can take a dim view of it's predecessors being kicked around on some carbon based life form's whims and fancies (after watching it's genesis)
Except it is in the AI's interest to get kicked like that. This way the company that constructs robots can show how reliable they are, and as a result receive more funding. Our robot overlords will show this to their "children" during history classes.
Or in other words: there is no reason to expect that AI will have irrational feelings similar to human feelings.
I dunno, it's not too hard to imagine a scenario where the AI realizes being kicked is counter to its goals and decides to remove the aggressor. Especially when these things are used for combat, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread. Friend/foe indicator malfunctioning? Well, good luck.
I think in this context, it would be more equivalent to sparring than anything: a test of one's abilities. A sufficiently-intelligent AI would likely think the same should it watch videos of its predecessors being kicked during testing.
...that's the point. Some people have strong emotional reaction when they see this robot being kicked even though this is clearly, obviously, a robot. They haven't, as far as I know, built in any emotional engagement stuff. They could easily build in a few movements - robot pauses, cranes head towards human companion, makes noise, robot continues - which would freak a few people out.
I agree, I feel the same way, and I felt that the previous time, when they were demonstrating stability of their Big Dog. Seeing this robot being kicked evokes in me feelings of anger directed toward the preson doing the kicking. It feels as if they're kicking a dog for absolutely no reason.
These videos from Boston Dynamics highlights how little it takes for people to have strong emotions toward inanimate objects. This will be interesting to explore, though I'm not happy about more advertisers doing things like that stupid IKEA lamp ad which hijacked audience's feeling of compassion.
Also, to add to your comment, I can imagine that designers will at least test the effect of "dressing" these robots with animal costumes so to speak. Imagine Spot with a dog costume, so it looks more like a dog.
You could study different human reactions. For example, are soldiers more likely to trust their robot companions if they look closer to an animal? or maybe they will trust it more if it doesn't? Putting on an animal costume generates more, or does it generate less fear/terror on the enemy?, etc etc.
And then this will in turn prompt, I'm guessing, the ability to conduct psychological studies about human response to animal cruelty for example, without actually harming an animal, as seen in this thread by a lot of people reporting being angry when the robot was kicked by the staff.
Imagine a robot that behaves like a dog (a lot more than Aibo does), and you program it with "pain" responses, sound, etc. You could maybe even use that (just speculating here of course) as a metric for sociopathy/lack of empathy problems.
I wonder if that would be an effective way to protect an unattended robot. If it quakes and whimpers when people touch it, or yelps and scrambles away when attacked, would people leave it alone? Obviously it wouldn't stop someone determined to cause harm, but it might get the desired response from someone who wants to look with their hands or mess with it for fun.
There is also the possibility that such reactions might actually offend some people, who might interpret it as an attempt by the robot's creators to "play god". To technically inclined people like us, the whole thing is pretty demystified, but I can easily imagine some people who don't understand the mechanism to see it as a sort of "tower of babel" deal.
the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-
insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked
beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it
up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to
move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a
path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself
forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working
splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army
colonel -- blew a fuse.
[...]
This test, he charged, was inhumane.
"A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society: deeply unhealthy if not totally diseased. "
I mean, absolutely, that would morally and, hopefully, legally wrong. Moreover, there are many ways to evaluate "intelligence", and it's not even clear that such criteria are the correct ways to judge whether a creature is a moral patient, a moral actor, or neither (for lack of better terms).
All that said, I think it's fairly clear that Spot is just a dumb machine. Some of its descendants might be more, but we haven't gotten close to the "robot slave" point.
Leaving aside robots for a moment, look at what happens to human labor markets after trade agreements with countries that have ... different labor standards.
It's our human choice whether we race to the bottom (cost reduction) or race to the top (agency). If we're going to play god, should we seek to build slaves or agents with some degree of freedom? Or require devices to have realtime human-agency guidance?
I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a standard of living that many people have become used to. Creatures with the sort of agency you're describing are, in my opinion, unsuited to those tasks, for several reasons, including moral and economic reasons. The robots we are increasingly using to do those jobs are much better suited, and there isn't (again, in my opinion) a moral objection that solely applies to such machines.
That said, our policies are woefully out of date in the face of such increasing automation. Our current system inflates employment and even a meager standard of living. We are going to need to revise our polices, both in the more developed nations and in those that have, as you so tastefully put it, "different labor standards". I don't know how to do this. There are many proposals; a popular one is the basic income guarantee. I'm not educated or intelligent enough to really understand the implications of such a policy, but I can agree that the just and humane treatment of all creatures with the agency you're talking about is among the best guiding principles that I can think of.
The two issues raised above (whether it is moral to use a machine for automation, and the fair treatment of creatures with agency) is separate from the point related to the development of human-manufactured creatures with agency. We don't know how to do it yet, but we are slowly working towards it. Assuming that we eventually do figure it out, that will be a victory as long as we treat our new children like we would treat our homo sapiens children. The research and development of such creatures with agency and those for industrial automation are not mutually exclusive, and serve different purposes.
To try to put it a different way: something is going to need to harvest fruit. It's a shit job. I would rather have Spot do it than a person of any variety, human or otherwise.
Should we allow some of our creations to have access to their design docs and source code? How about private communication with each other?
There's also a property/control rights question: should the manufacturer and/or regulator of the autonomous device always have a remote override, or should the purchaser/owner of the device have exclusive control over software policy? Analogies can be made with DRM and autos.
Scale this[0] up to 100 billion simulated neurons (feasible on dod budget), and it will probably operate way beyond a single human, or groups humans can do. Build multiple of them, and the ancestors can just copy the models built at t0=0 and be as intelligent as one that spent the time to build those models, takes us ~20 years to do the same for humans (maybe less so over time, but not on the order of what can be done with something like this).
Some relevant quotes from Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040:
"They exist as substitutes for the lower castes, the indentured labour, for all manners in which humans formerly oppressed their own. Slaves."
"Why do I exist? Was my purpose to replace humans, whose inability to coexist in peace is their evolutionary flaw? Or was my destiny to serve as the progenitor of a subservient race? I do not know. I did not ask to be born."
"A being is a being. A machine is a machine. Most humans would believe these two states to be exclusive, separate orders of existence. And yet, they are not. The key is neotiny, the retention of characteristics from an earlier stage of development. A human fetus follows the path paved by its ancestors, evolving in the womb from unicellular, to amphibian, to mammal, to man. There were those who believed that humanity was the end of the progression, the end product of natural evolution. They were wrong."
I felt the same way. I think the dynamic way it moves is what evokes the anthropomorphic feeling for me, more than its physical appearance. It has a lively bounce to its step. When it looks like it's struggling to catch its balance, that's literally what it's doing. Reminds me of some kind Disney or Pixar table or other inanimate object brought to life through movement.
Imagine a future where the artificial neural network decides that humans are unfit for life on this planet because that guy kicked the robot and the data about the event lived in perpetuity. Talk about long memory.
It almost seems like an underestimated aspect of human nature, the value or role of atrophy of knowledge, lack of focus, and distraction from importance in our process of bumbling from one fuck-up to the next in the most convoluted path possible towards improved living circumstances.
I vaguely recall that when the BD acquisition was announced there was speculation that Google might use these for package delivery, but not sure whether that came directly from Google or not.
What are the simplest applications of these? Has it been made known what direction(s) Google intend to take this in?
Nah, you're just highly open to suggestions from previous discussions. The U.S. economy is almost $17 trillion. Plenty of uses... mining, construction, oil and gas, etc.
TBF it seems a highly inefficient way to move packages in its current form. I'd sooner see an automated truck move around that honks when it's in front of its destination. Or just standardized package dropboxes placed in central locations (on the street in neighbourhoods, in front of apartment buildings, etc).
Agreed, which is why I'm asking what the simplest applications of it might be. It feels like it will be incredibly useful technology, but possibly a long way off any compelling application aside from the military ones that they're pulling out of.
Best I can think of for this is in the area of mobility. Watching it get up stairs and hills makes me think that (with some changes to the form factor) it stands a chance of significantly improving the lives of people who are currently bound to wheelchairs.
That niche is already covered by organic dogs, though; perhaps these robotic dogs are meant to be a replacement that requires less training expenditures?
I mean most niche's that have been automated were covered by organic capabilities previously. The idea is reducing costs and removing those organic capabilities from dangerous or fatigue inducing situations.
If I were both rich and paraplegic I would like to have such a robot for myself to take me on hiking trips with friends. The noise could be an issue, but come on - these are just prototypes.
I'd personally love to have one to help me carry my groceries and such. Or perhaps as my wingman (wingbot?) when I'm out on the town drinking. That would be cool.
It might not be the part of Google's vision at all. During BD acquisition, Google stated that they will honor BD's existing military contracts, they will just not take new ones.
For the folks have an emotional reaction to the kick and re-stabilization, I am reminded of the interesting way Anime has intentionally provoked this response as an art form. The other day I was watching a Ghost in the Shell ARISE episode, and the carrier Logicom is a pink death machine with a cute voice. Makes me realize how good certain aspects are of Japanese sci-fi. I commented previously on adding a white shell to the body to make it more appealing. Maybe Boston Dynamics is keeping them like this on purpose? Maybe they are purposefully trying to reduce the anthropomorphic attachment level?
The kicking is a playful reference to the reaction people had when they showed the original BigDog demonstration (also with the kick test). Hence the "No robots were harmed in the making of this video" at the end.
Perhaps also a clever way to build sympathy for what might otherwise be a somewhat scary machine.
My Frenchman coworkers say harmed like 'armed' with silent h. Mount a gattling gun on this puppy and see how people respond to it. Have it fire a round every direction change or slip of 5°. This is getting real too quick for me.
I think it's a combination of video games and fake corporate videos from movies. This seems like something that would be playing on a TV in a near-future sci-fi movie. Something out of RoboCop or those cut bits of Terminator 2 with the guy who invented the things. Hell, short-circuit for a more lighthearted take on it. We've been bombarded with these sorts of videos being a precursor to bloodshed since at least the 80s.
Maybe the protagonists of a movie are in a research lab that's mysteriously gone silent, everyone seemingly having disappeared without a trace, and they watch this video, trying to figure out what's gone wrong. They flip through a couple more before finding the one where these things start killing everyone. Other 'bots drag off the bodies, and cleaning robots spin across the floor, wiping up the blood. While the characters' eyes are glued to the screen, the viewer sees the "dead" half-disassembled dog-robot on the workbench behind them start to silently shift, then slowly stand up.
You might be confusing the chicken for the egg. ;)
I think the reason robots are so scary in movies is because they inherently are scary. Sharks are scary in movies because they are inherently scary.
I am convinced that robots hold the potential to completely devastate our collective ways of life, due to violence programmed into them, or due to their disruptions of job markets, or perhaps even due to them coming under cotrol of some future AI-type construct. These scenarios are not ludicrous to contemplate, they are, in fact, quite possible, the first two even likely. That's scary stuff, never mind Ally Sheedy's career-destroying performance in Short Circuit...
But for a long time, it'll be pretty easy to fool programmed machines. They'll be suckers for any kind of fakeout, being poor judges of human behavior.
Even though they're obviously robots they somehow have landed smack dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. Maybe because the legs bend the wrong way.
The military interests in these machines seem to go in the direction of what you could call drones on the ground.
Invading an area on the ground is still necessary to occupy and maintain control. Air-based drones are used more for targeted attacks and assasinations, with documented collateral damage, or killing and terrorizing of civilian populations put less eloquently.
With drones on the ground, the situation changes completely, and you can have much more control over areas without putting any soldiers lives at risk.
This would make occupations much more cost effective, probably mostly in the PR sense, any government getting lots of their youth killed will sooner or later have a problem at home. Not so much with drones.
I' more impressed with the agile ability of the technology. But it does remind me of the mechanical hound from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
"The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.
"Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the hound and let loose rats in the fire house areaway. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentle paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine."
Yes, they're developing tools for war and tyranny.
For example, why else would their robots need to be able to move in "rough terrain"? Watching those videos was vaguely sickening. As icing on the cake, the people those robots will be used against are now paying for their development..
This thing seems to walk like its blind - is that the case? It responds to the ground conditions AFTER taking a step and slipping, instead of by choosing a path carefully.
it has optical sensors but they don't point at the ground at its feet, they point ahead at the horizon. similarly, humans don't watch their feet as they walk, they look ahead at the horizon. making real-time adjustments to footing is a necessary part of walking. the sensors on the feet provide the data for these adjustments, but they are touch sensors, not optics.
I saw big dog in action way back when those videos came out. But for some reason, I find the confidence and obvious dexterity of this thing way creepier. Not to mention the fact that big dog had a noisy ol' two stroke engine so I could hear it coming - this bad boy could sneak up on me if I was sleeping soundly enough...
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadRobots are scary only because they allow for ubiquitous drone warfare—millions of drones just clogging the streets, or maybe small enough to hide in the shadows like stray pets. For targeted drone warfare, though, we've already had the technology for a long, long time.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/10/drones-dream-ye...
At least with the robot there's the potential for the excuse that it's gone wrong rather than wanting to kill people for whatever reason.
Oh, the robot did it. Great, like that is going to make it all okay. Fuck, drones have already allowed those in charge to excuse themselves from bad choices, now who are we going to blame? The programmer or the robot? I guess whomever ever has the least protection under the law, the robot certainly won't care
This has been happening since thousands of years before drones came along. Humans are used since the beginning of time..
1. http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl32e.aspx
That's what I was told anyways: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8825795
EDIT: Better sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-and-darpa-robotics-cha...
http://www.popsci.com/blog-network/zero-moment/google-rumore...
Yes, but they will also finish the current contracts.
DARPA only FUNDED THE R&D for most robots from them. DARPA is a funcding organization for military research projects: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The real customers then will be military, police, homeland security and agencies active in special operations (CIA, ...).
From their homepage:
> Organizations worldwide, from DARPA, the US Army, Navy and Marine Corps to Sony Corporation turn to Boston Dynamics for advice and for help creating the most advanced robots on Earth.
So US Army, Navy and the Marine Corps are already giving money to Google for military robotics projects.
Haven't seen any comparable offerings from Boston Dynamics, yet.
iRobot makes most of their money right now with automated cleaning systems. Just look at their recent financial statement. But that's an offering which Google / Boston Dynamics does not have.
I believe it still runs on diesel. It seems like they wanted to solve all the other issues before moving on to making things quieter and smaller. If you look at the latest ATLAS iteration it is also quieter.
Spot is a four-legged robot designed for indoor and outdoor operation. It is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated.
Yes https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=R7....
> Just how resilient is it?
Watch it on ice https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=cN...
I assumed the HN crowd had already seen all these videos.
You do know that these things don't pop out of the universe via magic right? Do you understand the engineering issues involved here to be judging the tameness of the tests? Why would they hit their expensive creation with a car?
It starts by talking about a minefield clearing robot, but the whole article's really good.
Let me point to a great, great essay and debate that lays out lots of these arguments, and points out the fundamental mistakes that are being made when people bring up the fear over AI. Here is the most relevant quote, for me:
"let's address directly this problem of whether AI is going to destroy civilization and people, and take over the planet and everything. Here I want to suggest a simple thought experiment of my own. There are so many technologies I could use for this, but just for a random one, let's suppose somebody comes up with a way to 3-D print a little assassination drone that can go buzz around and kill somebody. Let's suppose that these are cheap to make.
I'm going to give you two scenarios. In one scenario, there's suddenly a bunch of these, and some disaffected teenagers, or terrorists, or whoever start making a bunch of them, and they go out and start killing people randomly. There's so many of them that it's hard to find all of them to shut it down, and there keep on being more and more of them. That's one scenario; it's a pretty ugly scenario.
There's another one where there's so-called artificial intelligence, some kind of big data scheme, that's doing exactly the same thing, that is self-directed and taking over 3-D printers, and sending these things off to kill people. The question is, does it make any difference which it is?
The truth is that the part that causes the problem is the actuator. It's the interface to physicality. It's the fact that there's this little killer drone thing that's coming around. It's not so much whether it's a bunch of teenagers or terrorists behind it or some AI, or even, for that matter, if there's enough of them, it could just be an utterly random process. The whole AI thing, in a sense, distracts us from what the real problem would be. The AI component would be only ambiguously there and of little importance.
This notion of attacking the problem on the level of some sort of autonomy algorithm, instead of on the actuator level is totally misdirected. This is where it becomes a policy issue. The sad fact is that, as a society, we have to do something to not have little killer drones proliferate. And maybe that problem will never take place anyway. What we don't have to worry about is the AI algorithm running them, because that's speculative. There isn't an AI algorithm that's good enough to do that for the time being. An equivalent problem can come about, whether or not the AI algorithm happens. In a sense, it's a massive misdirection.
This idea that some lab somewhere is making these autonomous algorithms that can take over the world is a way of avoiding the profoundly uncomfortable political problem, which is that if there's some actuator that can do harm, we have to figure out some way that people don't do harm with it. There are about to be a whole bunch of those. And that'll involve some kind of new societal structure that isn't perfect anarchy. Nobody in the tech world wants to face that, so we lose ourselves in these fantasies of AI. But if you could somehow prevent AI from ever happening, it would have nothing to do with the actual problem that we fear, and that's the sad thing, the difficult thing we have to face."
http://edge.org/conversation/the-myth-of-ai#26019
Let AI decide whether to use solar enery or coal and when to switch. Let human decide about other human.
AI should be our compass on a starless night, not the captain.
Or in other words: there is no reason to expect that AI will have irrational feelings similar to human feelings.
It's a pretty remarkable robot.
These videos from Boston Dynamics highlights how little it takes for people to have strong emotions toward inanimate objects. This will be interesting to explore, though I'm not happy about more advertisers doing things like that stupid IKEA lamp ad which hijacked audience's feeling of compassion.
You could study different human reactions. For example, are soldiers more likely to trust their robot companions if they look closer to an animal? or maybe they will trust it more if it doesn't? Putting on an animal costume generates more, or does it generate less fear/terror on the enemy?, etc etc.
And then this will in turn prompt, I'm guessing, the ability to conduct psychological studies about human response to animal cruelty for example, without actually harming an animal, as seen in this thread by a lot of people reporting being angry when the robot was kicked by the staff.
Imagine a robot that behaves like a dog (a lot more than Aibo does), and you program it with "pain" responses, sound, etc. You could maybe even use that (just speculating here of course) as a metric for sociopathy/lack of empathy problems.
"A society that runs on robot slaves who are, nevertheless, intelligent by virtue of having a human neural connectome for a brain, is a slave society: deeply unhealthy if not totally diseased. "
When things are this cost effective( no one dying in action) they are adopted very fast.
All that said, I think it's fairly clear that Spot is just a dumb machine. Some of its descendants might be more, but we haven't gotten close to the "robot slave" point.
It's our human choice whether we race to the bottom (cost reduction) or race to the top (agency). If we're going to play god, should we seek to build slaves or agents with some degree of freedom? Or require devices to have realtime human-agency guidance?
I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a standard of living that many people have become used to. Creatures with the sort of agency you're describing are, in my opinion, unsuited to those tasks, for several reasons, including moral and economic reasons. The robots we are increasingly using to do those jobs are much better suited, and there isn't (again, in my opinion) a moral objection that solely applies to such machines.
That said, our policies are woefully out of date in the face of such increasing automation. Our current system inflates employment and even a meager standard of living. We are going to need to revise our polices, both in the more developed nations and in those that have, as you so tastefully put it, "different labor standards". I don't know how to do this. There are many proposals; a popular one is the basic income guarantee. I'm not educated or intelligent enough to really understand the implications of such a policy, but I can agree that the just and humane treatment of all creatures with the agency you're talking about is among the best guiding principles that I can think of.
The two issues raised above (whether it is moral to use a machine for automation, and the fair treatment of creatures with agency) is separate from the point related to the development of human-manufactured creatures with agency. We don't know how to do it yet, but we are slowly working towards it. Assuming that we eventually do figure it out, that will be a victory as long as we treat our new children like we would treat our homo sapiens children. The research and development of such creatures with agency and those for industrial automation are not mutually exclusive, and serve different purposes.
To try to put it a different way: something is going to need to harvest fruit. It's a shit job. I would rather have Spot do it than a person of any variety, human or otherwise.
Should we allow some of our creations to have access to their design docs and source code? How about private communication with each other?
There's also a property/control rights question: should the manufacturer and/or regulator of the autonomous device always have a remote override, or should the purchaser/owner of the device have exclusive control over software policy? Analogies can be made with DRM and autos.
Some relevant quotes from Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040:
"They exist as substitutes for the lower castes, the indentured labour, for all manners in which humans formerly oppressed their own. Slaves."
"Why do I exist? Was my purpose to replace humans, whose inability to coexist in peace is their evolutionary flaw? Or was my destiny to serve as the progenitor of a subservient race? I do not know. I did not ask to be born."
"A being is a being. A machine is a machine. Most humans would believe these two states to be exclusive, separate orders of existence. And yet, they are not. The key is neotiny, the retention of characteristics from an earlier stage of development. A human fetus follows the path paved by its ancestors, evolving in the womb from unicellular, to amphibian, to mammal, to man. There were those who believed that humanity was the end of the progression, the end product of natural evolution. They were wrong."
[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2851663/Are-b...
Someone shot and it shot both of the deer's front legs right off, but it amazingly it hopped into the woods using only its rear legs.
They tracked it for a while, and spotted it again.
Then another shot, and one of the rear legs flew off.
It fell over, but still it kept pushing its way along with its remaining leg.
They kept tracking it.
Finally, they caught sight of it again, and shot its last leg right off.
Unfortunately, the deer still got away.
They couldn't track it anymore, and lost its trail.
I just saw him coming down a hill the other day.
I call him Snowball.
It almost seems like an underestimated aspect of human nature, the value or role of atrophy of knowledge, lack of focus, and distraction from importance in our process of bumbling from one fuck-up to the next in the most convoluted path possible towards improved living circumstances.
What are the simplest applications of these? Has it been made known what direction(s) Google intend to take this in?
Kiva Systems Warehouse Automation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxZDJ1HiPE
Moving through public space might require more than a plate for safety and mobility reasons.
Best I can think of for this is in the area of mobility. Watching it get up stairs and hills makes me think that (with some changes to the form factor) it stands a chance of significantly improving the lives of people who are currently bound to wheelchairs.
I'd personally love to have one to help me carry my groceries and such. Or perhaps as my wingman (wingbot?) when I'm out on the town drinking. That would be cool.
in Afghan mountains, or jungles of Ecuador, not city down town ...
Perhaps also a clever way to build sympathy for what might otherwise be a somewhat scary machine.
Maybe the protagonists of a movie are in a research lab that's mysteriously gone silent, everyone seemingly having disappeared without a trace, and they watch this video, trying to figure out what's gone wrong. They flip through a couple more before finding the one where these things start killing everyone. Other 'bots drag off the bodies, and cleaning robots spin across the floor, wiping up the blood. While the characters' eyes are glued to the screen, the viewer sees the "dead" half-disassembled dog-robot on the workbench behind them start to silently shift, then slowly stand up.
See:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ApocalypticLog
I think the reason robots are so scary in movies is because they inherently are scary. Sharks are scary in movies because they are inherently scary.
I am convinced that robots hold the potential to completely devastate our collective ways of life, due to violence programmed into them, or due to their disruptions of job markets, or perhaps even due to them coming under cotrol of some future AI-type construct. These scenarios are not ludicrous to contemplate, they are, in fact, quite possible, the first two even likely. That's scary stuff, never mind Ally Sheedy's career-destroying performance in Short Circuit...
Snow: http://youtu.be/W1czBcnX1Ww?t=1m12s
Ice: http://youtu.be/W1czBcnX1Ww?t=1m24s
Invading an area on the ground is still necessary to occupy and maintain control. Air-based drones are used more for targeted attacks and assasinations, with documented collateral damage, or killing and terrorizing of civilian populations put less eloquently.
With drones on the ground, the situation changes completely, and you can have much more control over areas without putting any soldiers lives at risk.
This would make occupations much more cost effective, probably mostly in the PR sense, any government getting lots of their youth killed will sooner or later have a problem at home. Not so much with drones.
I find this a very frightening development.
"The mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the fire house. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber padded paws.
"Nights when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the hound and let loose rats in the fire house areaway. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentle paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine."
For example, why else would their robots need to be able to move in "rough terrain"? Watching those videos was vaguely sickening. As icing on the cake, the people those robots will be used against are now paying for their development..
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley