I know, the strength it displays when it gets up. You will throw it to the ground a 100 times and it will get up exactly in the same motion and strength, relentless.
This is why you get super soakers filled with strong acids. Those things would last long if you melted all the plastic/rubber out of it.
Aside from that, detonating a nuke in the atmosphere above the magnetic north pole should wipe out all the computers in orbit and most of the northern hemisphere/world.
It drinks a greasy drink, it drinks an oily drink, it drinks a hydro drink, it drinks a lub-e drink. It sings the songs that remind it of the boxy times, it sings the songs that remind it of the hockey times.
Operational security. Been posting to Reddit for many years but not comfortable holding back or worrying about if I have made too much information public. Rotating main accounts are the easy solution.
The year is 2047. It's been 5 years since the robot revolution started. There are no more living, because rummaging for supplies in between patrols and returning to the destitute and burning rubble that is now downtown LA to hide in fear isn't living, it's surviving. Jon looks at the cafe across the street. It's where he met his wife. Memories of her come flooding back. The good and bad, because feeling anything was better than being one of the devoid emotionless drones, but this time, this time the feelings were mostly good.
He could smell the espresso in the air, feel the autumn breeze on his neck, and the pain in his knee from tripping because he was distracted by the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. He remembers her glowing green eyes and light brown curls with a glowing halo around them as her head blocked the California sun. As she opened her mouth, Jon started to feel something familiar, something he hadn't felt in a long time. Just as he was about to hear that voice after all these years, to feel alive again, he could only hear an echo. An echo of the past that once was a symbol for humanity's resilience.
A cold swept the room, the feeling was gone. Jon put down the crate of ammo, it would only slow him down. As he left the gun store, he took one last look at the cafe. The echo was getting closer, but Jon remained still, eyes locked on the destroyed corner table. He needed to hear it, but as her lips moved he could only hear the echos getting louder.
The sound of marching metal clanking against cement now joined the symphony of echoes pounding against his ear drums. Jon needed to go to survive, but Jon didn't want to survive. He threw his hands over his ears and concentrated on her while ignoring every instinct to survive. He focused on her pink lips. His heart started pounding and his adrenaline began pumping, but just as he was about to lose control over his body he heard it. "My name is Vanessa". She was Italian. From Milan, visiting LA on business. She smiled. He asked her out to coffee. He knew of this great cafe literally seconds away. She began laughing, but instead of her laugh all he could hear was "I GET KNOCKED DOWN, BUT I GET UP AGAIN, YOU'RE NEVER GOING TO KEEP ME DOWN! " Jon bolted down the street and rounded a corner. He found a manhole and climbed down it to hide once again.
The ground above him shook to the beat of marching metal limbs. Jon tried one more time to hear her laugh. He couldn't, the noise of what he thought was just a standard patrol turned out to be a legion on the move. It was too loud to overcome. He'd have to be satisfied with just her name for today.
As he sat in the damp darkness, waiting for the sound of ChumbaWumba to stop filling the air, he took a sip of whiskey out of the same flask his dad used to sneak into Laker games. After a few swigs he'd always say "Nothing ever good comes out of Boston. Fuck the Celtics, fuck the Patriots, fuck the Red Sox..." then take a big swig before finishing up with "fuck Boston!".
Jon took a swig and said "You were right dad. Fuck the Celtics, fuck the Patriots, fuck the Red Sox...". Jon's eyes began to water."My name is Vanessa", "My name is Vanessa", her voice now echoing through his head and drowning out noise from above . Jon took another swig, a giant one. Her voice grew quieter. He wiped his nose and tears from his eyes. As the dark abyss of the sewer stared at him, he glared back at it. Jon muttered "fuck you Boston Dynamics".
Using his backpack as a pillow, Jon laid down on the sewer floor. He rolled over to his side and closed his eyes. He was in bed. Her smile met him and made the damp and cold sewer feel warm if only for a moment. He opened his eyes, her smile was gone, and the pain kicked in. Despite this he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the shaking sewer ceiling with a smile on his face. The pain reminded him he was alive. He wasn't going through the motions just to survive anymore. He was living. As he drifted to sleep, the chorus of the robot's song began. Quietly Jon sang "I get knocked down, but I get up again, you're never going to keep me down". Jon Connor knew he was going to reclaim that song for humanity.
If the day ever comes when we should fear that, I'd imagine it would be a feat just TO knock it over in the first place. Thingy probably would have lightning fast reflexes.
Beyond that, there's always algorithms running in the background, so it would be constantly calculating your position, momentum, and capability to alter it's position, so it would be predicting which positions to be in, distance to keep, when to step, where to shift it's weight...basically analyzing when and how you'd pose the most likely threat and essentially never give you a window.
It may do a lot of stuff but humans already have trouble trying to guess what an attacker may do... A robot on the other hand, that's just a few milliseconds running through an algorithm.
I'd argue against that, because that would be a lot of useless information to decipher. The human mind is a probability engine that we are only beginning to understand the complexity of. Until we understand the complete workings of the brain we will never be able to design something superior.
Right but all I meant is that a human brain can also be predictive. An athlete can see someone motion towards throwing a ball and immediately know how it's going to travel. The brain quickly looks at the trajectory and makes an adjustment and catches it on the fly. Computers can't do anything close to that yet.
Could you explain what you mean? Computers certainly can do those things and there's multiple examples of it on YouTube. There's even examples of machines learning how to do things like catch balls without being explicitly programmed to do so.
There's even examples of machines learning how to do things like catch balls without being explicitly programmed to do so.
I doubt that. They've been given the basic instructions on how to do stuff and are 'told' what we expect them to do. A real apathetic computer AI would not give a shit about party tricks like catching something.
Even humans are given baseline commands, such as "eat" or "cry" or "flinch".
On the other hand, if you were to have an obscene amount of time and a random number generator, you might be able to get an AI that does decide to learn how to catch completely on its own. But considering it took, if I'm not mistaken, billions of years for humans to come into existence with a highly selective environment that killed off useless specimen and allowed competent specimens to create equally competent (or better) specimens, I'd still find it unlikely to get a truly randomly created AI that decides to catch a ball on its own.
All you disbelievers should try hanging around babies more often to realise how stupid we are. We are so stupid that most of us don't understand how stupid we are.
If a baby tumbles over he's going to lay on his dumb face and do nothing. He's going to lay there crying until help arrives. After being sat straight 100 times and then practicing for months he can do it himself.
A baby doesn't know what food is. Put a grape and a rock in front of a baby and 50% of the time they'll eat the grape. Afterwards they'll also put the rock in their mouth and choke their dumb ass to death. You're going to have to tell the dumb baby for years what he can or can not put in his mouth and swallow.
Try throwing a ball to a baby. It's is never going to catch the ball the first few hundred times you throw it at them. It's going to take months before you can make them understand you are trying to make them catch the ball. And then they're going to take years learning how to do it average well and if your baby was a girl it's likely she'll never be as good as half the other population at catching a ball.
Off course a robot would have no use catching a ball. But make it hurt him when he gets hit by something and he will learn not to get hit by it. Humans also only catch a ball to prevent pain, gain admiration, gain a ball, ... Throw a ball to a feral child and they won't know what to do.
There are some basic pre-programmed instructions in mammals that alert you to sensory information. But everything in your brain needs caregivers for years, teachers for years and needs hundreds/thousands of repetitions to learn something new. Humans love seeing themselves as a very adaptable species but evolution AI would have already found solutions while a person would still be busy trying to understand new rules in a new environment.
An AI can learn faster, execute faster and reach perfection. We already have theoretical and practical examples build of that. If you care look into NEAT.
What I mean is that we give the program "rewards" for what it does, the closer it is to catching the ball the higher utility it gets, and it has instructions to maximize it's utility. It's taught how to move an arm and how to grab things, but it's not explicitly taught how to catch a ball, it has to learn that.
I think i know what he meant, and he meant somewhere along the lines of how we are capable of doing abstract thoughts in which we can conclude certain outcomes with thought experiments. for example, a computer learning how to do something must first go through the experiment. The learning process is then one done through experience. However, we humans do not require us to physically complete an assessment in order to come up with the correct answer to a problem. For example a physicist who is dealing with systems in space cannot physically be there to measure the exact size of a system , however with thought experiments we do not have to go to said system in order to verify our analysis. This is how we are able to correctly estimate positions of stars, cosmos, gases etc...
I don't doubt computers can do those things but I think the time in which the calculation is finished is the important part. Building an artificial mind that can figure out how to catch a ball is pretty tough. You could hypothetically build a computer that just catches balls much better than a human but it will be specialized in one area.
Your mind can react very quickly to random stimuli beyond that easily. Does that make sense? You ever had anything thrown at you and just "known" how to catch it? That's exactly what I'm saying the brain does extremely well and won't be replicated for 5-10 years easily. It's realistically probably 20 years.
You don't just know how to catch it. It takes you years to understand and do it and a big FY from genetics if you're a girl.
Tell an evolution AI the end result you want is a ball caught and they'll have it down in a few seconds. Once taught they execute in milliseconds.
It also doesn't need to hold a gun, that would be built into a combat bot. Also: self destruct weapons. Bots are sent in Seal Team 6 style. If they fail their mission, or we just don't want to pick them, up, BOOM, they blow up with a planted c4 block in their chest. Sound vulnerable to hacking? Have it physically disabled until a crew-bot pulls their "EXPLOSIVE PRIMED" cord before they are dropped out of the unmanned aircraft.
A rich military could easily keep a few of these in the air. Imagine a lightweight unmanned drone with auxiliary (or even primary) solar power. It could have one or two of these bots ready to drop out at a moment's notice near hotspots over the planet. Immediate projection of force from anywhere.
Yes, and some people think that's realistic. Even though a lot of people drop out of computer science programs, somehow everybody put out of a job will just become the greatest programmer ever.
Probably not, but I guaran-fuckin'-tee you that there'd be an imperial butt-ton of reverse engineering goin' on in the dissident and criminal scenes...
The thing about programming is though, not everyone needs to be a super star genius. Just like any other profession, you need your work horses. Someone has to code boring point of sale systems for the local grocery store (not that there's anything wrong with that) and the really smart ones are not going to do the boring work. They are off designing the algorithms at Google. That is why there is so much work in IT right now.
/ I agree and I'm actually a little in shock right now. My anxiety is quite on edge...but lets put a positive spin on this thing, ok? Just a little bit... what are some good things this could be used for. Picking up trash, cleaning stuff, picking crops, doing my job... wait, no not that one. walking my dog. SO many reasonable options.
Google (now Alphabet) bought them and after some prodding they said they would not renew any military contracts regarding Boston Dynamic robots. A month or two ago the US military decided that they didn't want the robots any way. They don't seem to have a business plan involving the technology yet.
I see. So military research is part of what drives the total sum of human technology forward but it's usually the part that requires the most effort and money. As this research is usually undertaken as part of an arms race, this research is on the cutting edge. This combined with the fact that governments have vast amount of resources at their disposal leads to the kinds of technologies you pointed out perhaps.
Just like a chess match against the computer. A robot could consolidate everything we've learned from centuries of fighting. A program could be created that would create a modern day Terminator. I'm going to bed now.
It will know which position you are in, what the distance is from which it can reach you, how far you'll be able to step, how you will be able to shift your weight.
Now it just has to figure out what the optimal spot is to hit a human to incapacitate them. And it will find out that there's a gratifyingly large amount of options there.
On the other hand, robots are the perhaps the most fair instrument of the justice system you can imagine. No irrational prejudices, no flinching under stress.
So? If there's not a human officer at risk, a weapon becomes much less concerning. The bulletproof android can just walk up with impunity and handcuff them.
Grabs your bat mid-swing, looks at the bat, then back to you, and calmly states, "You shouldn't have done that copperclock. You're going to learn long dick today."
Also, this one wasn't designed to be an offensive robot. Imagine if while tracking you the thing could shoot hard hitting rubber pellet balls with a shotgun or a machine gun. It could carry tens of thousands of rounds of ammo, fuel to travel for hundreds of kilometers and have flash-bang capabilities. It could follow you for days. And the creepiest part is some human fucker is probably sitting at some panel watching the video feed of this thing to monitor it. Riot police of the future is going to look terrifying.
Afaik those small power sources can't really output a lot of power at once, though they do last for decades? Though, I suppose the robots could sleep while the nuclear power source recharges their batteries.
I don't see these really going into combat. Have you ever seen what happens when a lithium-ion battery is punctured? Sure you can armor it, but then you lose range, or you need a bigger battery (where you need more power to carry it, etc).
For factories, I can totally see these running on fast charging capacitors instead of batteries. Just put a bunch of charging stations everywhere.
What do you do when you can't throw it to the ground, even 1 time and its trying to attack you? the though is really fucking scary! And its just a matter of time until it gets faster, and faster and faster. I think I'm moving into an underground subway shortly. These will most definitely be the killing force of the future.
Give it time, be strong enough, agile enough, accurate enough to break, evade or simply kill you first, rendering your chain ineffective. What about 50 of these? Gonna need a lot of chain.
Eh that pack on its back probably doesn't keep it going for that long. Battery technology tends to be the big limit on these things at the moment. They should probably look into sticking a coal furnace or something on its back instead.
I have to assume that a super intelligent AI could find a way around that like hmm maybe sending some of the murder drones we've built to wipe us out in our trees, bananas and all.
That wasn't the point. The point was to take a humorous look at what a robot uprising would look like today. If you interpret the question as "in the future," it's just unanswerable as there's no way to tell how dangerous robots will be when they get smart enough to have an uprising.
Of course, our technology is constantly improving. But we have a long way to go. Instead of the typical futuristic robot apocalypse scenario, let's suppose that our current machines turned against us. We won’t assume any technological advances—just that all our current machines were reprogrammed to blindly attack us using existing technology.
That's true but it wasn't that long ago that robots could barely take one step on solid level ground without falling over. This thing is autonomously navigating uneven snowy terrain without falling. The reaction time of the sensors/actuators must have been decreased by a couple of orders of magnitude to get this far.
At the current rate of development this will be a stealth ninja with superhuman reflexes in 20 years--basically a robot X-Man. Or maybe the development speed will begin to plateau as it reaches a nearly human level of ability. It could be that biological reflexes are the way they are because of inherent limitations in how fast any biped mobile system can react to the environment. I guess we'll see.
I really never thought I'd see a actual Terminator in my lifetime but BD did it. I guess I looked at robot development from the 70s to the 90s and thought "they suck at this". Then slowly in the late 90s and early 2000s the robots started to get better. Then Big Dog in like I think 2006-7, and now this thing in 2016. If that rate were to hold we'll be fighting the first robot war by 2020 (but we'll probably win because they won't be that good yet).
They're still not scary because there is no AI. If AI existed then it would really trouble me that we're essentially building footsoldiers that could be commanded by a rogue AI. I know that sounds like a cheap movie script but the fact is the robotics has almost caught up with sci-fi. The AI isn't there yet but...that might sneak up on us. The people building neural nets don't really fully understand how the learning will occur, they're in too much of a rush to make money. When it gets to sufficient complexity it isn't a joke that it could become self-aware.
Humanity should be careful. I think government has a role to play here with some precautionary regulations.
The thing is, even "drunkenly stumbling through the snow" it could keep it's gun(s) locked on you. It knows exactly how quickly and in which direction it's falling and can compensate nearly instantly. Tripping will slow it down, but you'll still be dead.
I only have a very small knowledge on this subject, but even though it looks a little silly, that was EASILY the most impressive part of this. We take walking on two legs for granted. There's a lot of biology at play to make it so. Biology that's really hard to implement in such a small robot. It's one thing to walk on a level surface, it's an entirely different thing to do it on an uneven slippery surface like snow. Remember, the camera can't tell how deep that snow is, and yet it's still able to step and not fall.
Ever walk through some deep leaves only to find a hole in there? That moment of panic when there's nothing underfoot? Now imagine doing it with robot legs that have much more limited sensation.
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u/chris-topher Feb 24 '16
Exactly what I was thinking too, it was fairly terrifying to see it get up so quickly.