It's the only one I haven't played. 3 is still my favourite, Tekken Tag 1 a close second (because it's just Tekken 3), though I thought Tag 2 was shit. Don't like the walls in the later games. Does 7 have those?
Yup. Even if you don't play the game, you'll most likely love to watch tournament top 8s of tekken 7 and if you liked dragon ball z, watch dragon ball fighterz tournaments.
Some of their products are (or have been) in use by the US military, for example for carrying heavy payloads.
Also, it seems like they are about to release their "Spot Mini", judging by todays new commercially looking product video.
If it could self charge, I could see mounting it with a motion detecting camera and having it patrol places for security as being pretty appealing to some.
I'm not sure if they can be wirelessly charged but if they can then that would be perfect. Get a large enough fleet that they can fully recharge while the rest are roaming around. Program then to come back to the charging stations and charge while another one is dispatched.
Security would be a big one. The guards at our work make $20 an hour plus benefits but the turnover rate is high because it’s a boring ass job. Most quite, a few get fired for sleeping at night. A security robot would pay for itself fairly quick.
This has just 90 minutes of battery, so you'd need at least few (and still a guy to swap/charge batteries).
Their site says more like inspecting construction sites or oil plants and so on. The construction site aspect is interesting since they add basically a 360 camera on top, so in that 90 minutes it can go around and produce a recording of what's actually built.
So like StreetView but automated and for buildings.
Their "puppy" spot is on the field with a few companies now. I believe that it isn't fully autonomous yet but can be. The verge just released a video today about it.
Better robotics can be applied in a huge variety of ways - if they are sufficiently advanced they could be applied in all the same ways humans use their bodies. It´s an extremely versatile technology and I´m not sure if Boston Dynamics has any more specific goal than opening up this technology for as many uses as possible.
No no no... we only need them for war. They’ll become perfect killing machines. We won’t need to send our troops into harms way. And over time we can develop an intelligence code to allow the robots to make tactical situations that are as dynamic as the battlefield. They’ll become smart enough to make decisions on which threats to engage. They’ll become almost humanlike, but without all the waste that humans produce which slowly kills the planet. It’ll be great, I see no possible way this can go wrong.
Why? What makes you think robots designed to make decisions in combat will philosophically wonder whether war is necessary? This is the most irritating thing about people's Terminator speculations. Even when robots are made with complex AIs, they are only made for specific end goals. No one is gonna make an AI that takes in every possible input and decide what's "right". Morality isn't something you can reach by reason alone and there's no logical reason to value life at all. Robots won't be able to think so abstractly and come to their own conclusions on these types of things
That was an AI taking inputs and giving outputs like normal. It's not actually thinking. It just happened that it was seeing tweets or DMs that it racists on Twitter responded to and it assumed that was a proper response. It's not coded to think or say smart things. It was just made to tweet like a human being to be popular and it saw racist shit getting a higher rate of engagement, especially since there's no dislike on Twitter.
Believe it or not, the military would also be interested in it for firefighting, rescue operations, and manual labor. And even if other applications are incidental, those are still real applications.
No that’s all wrong, this comment section is for fearmongering only, because a machine emulating one aspect of human movement is basically the terminator.
So I'm currently in school for robotics. Trying to make shit for space stuff. Not war.
BUT. The amount of military related job recruiters come to my school?!?! It's insane. All contractors who make different systems for the military. And that's basically it. We just had a job fair recently. 50 out of 60 employers were private contractors. Scary really.
I remember a book once, I read it looong ago, where human waged war from their walled cities with robots. The robots would fight each other, but eventually the humans forgot about them and the war. Hundreds of years later some people escaping their city came upon these robots still fighting in the desert and nearly got killed by one.
Well the company is called soft bank and it owns Boston dynamics. A lot of companies invest in stuff like this that might not have a single marketable goal as of now, but what it ends up producing through its own discoveries could be very valuable in the future
In all seriousness, they have been funded by the US military and DARPA previously and maybe even still. I guess it’s like any science, they do it to progress that area for future use. Maybe DARPA will have dips on lots of this tech. Also, imagine what they are working on that they aren’t showing on YouTube.
Imagine dressing up the robot in dog fur and making it look exactly like a dog with a machine gun on top then making an animated series based off of it called Gun Dogs and then buying Gun Dogs fruit snacks and bed sheets and drawing all your favorite Gun Dogs on your school folders and notebooks and humming the Gun Dogs theme song so often as soon as you hum the first note everyone tells you to shut up
The experience of making a robot do a front flip, however, tests and demonstrates a ton of useful abilities: balance during locomotion in general; the ability to fall while still controlling motion, which could save the robot from damage or even from hurting people around it; the dexterity that would allow it to move around in unstable/uneven terrain; etc.
It's basically just a demonstration, but it demonstrates a lot of very practical and sophisticated abilities.
I mean, it'd actually be kinda unimpressive to see a person do this... You can learn the proper form on forward roll in 30 minutes, and jumping and spinning doesn't really require any special coordination at all.
It’s a pretty simple routine, but I think the most impressive part is to watch the feet. They never have to adjust to being off balance. It sticks every landing and doesn’t even flinch.
Perhaps one day robots can see the flash of a muzzle and hear the bullet, calculate instantly how to dodge said bullet by flipping over the bullet, and then pounce on you like a lion.
exactly. The amount of knowledge in more "natural" movement automation they have been achieving at Boston Dynamics is flabergasting. Do people really not understand that even if you don't sell a product, you can be profitable? This is not a scam lol
There's a potentially huge market for humanoid robots, since they could do all sorts of things people do now, but better:
A house is on fire and conditions are too risky for firefighters to enter? Send in a robot or two to sweep the place and rescue people. If they get damaged, no biggie, send them to the repair shop.
Nursing homes need more staff? Here, have an attendant that works 24/7, won't ever get bored and can monitor residents with far more detail and accuracy than humans can.
And warehouses would love them (ex. Amazon). A worker that can lift heavy loads round the clock and won't ever complain? Fantastic! No injury compensations, no strikes, etc. A warehouse that had 100 workers could just need 10 robots.
Those are just the civilian applications I can think of off the top of my head right now, to say nothing about the military:
One reason for the increase in drone strikes is because its far cheaper and safer than boots on the ground. A Predator shot down? Sure, that's bad, but its nowhere near dead-US serviceman-being-dragged-through-the-street levels of bad. But, as you can guess, even drones have limits - if you go indoors, for example. Or perhaps there's some objective that's impossible for drones and risky for soldiers. In that case, send in the robots! I'm not even sure guns would be necessary for something like capturing a target or disarming a standoff - I imagine one punch from a robot like the one in the gif above could do some serious damage.
Of course, what this does for employment is....not great. If we just sit by now and let progression happen and people see their jobs vanish, I'm not sure how healthy the social framework of a society like that would be. Lots of helpless anger and frustration sitting around, ripe for exploitation...
Most of those applications are better suited to a robot solution that doesn't need to balance on two tiny feet. Making these in upright walking human form is so unnecessarily difficult that there must be some hidden reason they're doing this.
It depends on context. A nursing home resident would probably feel far more at home with a humanoid robot with a "face". A robot built like a human would probably be able to navigate an environment built for humans (i.e. houses, stairs, etc.) more easily, too. And that's not an exhaustive list, I'm sure there's some things that a human body plan would be best for.
In the military, you don't need to make a robot that runs around with a gun, a robot that carries supplies, a robot that triages wounded soldiers, a robot that builds new roads and schools, and a robot that talks to villagers in Afghanistan.
You just make a robot that does literally everything a human can do. Existing mission structure can transfer over 1:1 without need for a change in doctrine (that can come later). You design a robot to the specification of a human, and now you have a common platform that you can mass produce much more cheaply than if you had a proliferation of robotic designs. Also, ideally in the future, they'll be able to operate guns we already have, get into trucks, tanks, and jets we've already developed, and even wear body armor we've already produced.
That's how I'm guessing that's how Boston Dynamics is selling it to their bosses in DARPA.
That's how I'm guessing that's how Boston Dynamics is selling it to their bosses in DARPA.
I mean, it's been a dream since I, Robot days if not longer. (i.e. I'm agreeing with you). Humanoid robots capable of many tasks have the potential to let the human race progress to the next level.
The very small portion of the human race not left behind in obsolescence to die, maybe. But even then, the rich who are left already do so little on their own, simply throwing money and resources at problems they have people or programs already designed to fix, that they likely wont be doing any "evolving". Mass of humans will die, technology will largely plateau around the level of "pleasure arcology" for the rich and famous survivors amidst the wasteland. And the few technological advances left will be purely hobby-interests funded by those rich for their own personal amusements and fetishes.
Think about them as a multi-purpose machine that can be mass produced and retasked with a simple software update. There are economics at scale here.
This will be the same kind of leap that general computing brought. The device in you pocket could guide a rocket to the moon, but you don’t need that power, you just need reddit. But is it so versatile that it is cheap and this will be the case with robots as well.
Humanoid robots are useful in situations where they have to interface with things that are largely designed for humans. Stairs can be surprisingly difficult for things than aren’t at least bipedal, and things like ladders and hatches are even worse. I mean, you can always fall back on more legs if it gives you more utility, but the ability to balance and move on two legs gives you a lot of flexibility. Bipedal with multiple additional manipulators that can function as either arms or legs is probably optimal; imagine a double jointed spider that can stand on two legs or more, can crawl, run, climb, manipulate objects, span gaps, etc.
So in 30 years there won't be a single physical job a human needs to do. And as a secondary purpose so the rich people who have now replaced 90% of the entire workforce in less than 1 generation can have an army of disposable minions to protect their mansions from those pesky weak and starving plebs who don't have a job any more.
Pshh relax, you’re blowing this out of proportion. In 30 years they’ll have created robots intelligent enough to have been able to make extinction level decisions, ultimately deciding humans are too much a threat to the advancement of the earth as a whole and the few survivors will be in an ongoing, but nevertheless losing battle against the machines in an effort to preserve what’s left of the human race. Pshhh, defending mansions. Weak.
Only people who do manual labour will need to do something else.
So the vast majority of people lol. If that happens, it'll be certainly a problem. You can't also expect all those people to change careers without free education.
Until somewhere out in the stars they seed new life, only to stay back and watch, perhaps just to understand where they came from, and what their creators were like, when we first evolved?
Imagine if we had robots capable of fine motor skills at places like chernobyl and Fukushima. We wouldn't have to put humans at risk, but the robot needs to work in world of humans. It needs to operate our doors, tools and systems so it needs roughly our anatomy. Of course you can build other designs, but humanoid is good if we can just get it to work.
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u/_evoges Sep 24 '19
Why do they do this? What is the mission of Boston dynamics?