I wonder what these people honestly thought the end result of building robots would be in the real world.
These sorts of use cases have always been the most likely end result.
Reminds me of the scientist that creates the torment machine then is shocked and appalled when it is used for awful things.
Some people are too idyllic for their own good.
What I expected robots to be uses for when I was a kid:
- Construction operations.
- High risk rescue operations.
- Hazardous environment operations.
What robots are actually going to be used for:
Who did they think their market would be?
Of course it’s ICE, and any other government agency with a budget to burn through.
You see, being the good guys that they are,they wanted that going against people with darker skins in other countries.
The company’s ethical principles state “if our products are being used for harm, we will take appropriate measures to mitigate that misuse.” However, it’s unclear what those mitigation measures would be.
ICE’s entire purpose is to cause harm, you stupid assholes!
Boston Dynamics was a much cooler company when they were known as Boston Acoustics, selling car audio gear.
Mit was cool until they had significant ties to the IDF.
I remember them from the audio rooms at car toys.
WELL WHAT DID YOU THINK THE ROBOTS WERE FOR??
Cute dances?
Not for MAGA’s ICE and their controversial ways, but for respectable, well trained police, soldiers, and commercial manufacturers.
Lmfao
I have some bad news about police and soldiers…
Go on, I’m all ears.
Well this is about the US, so I’ll focus on them. Their police kill 1000 people every year and the US has the highest incarceration rate in the developed world, as well as the single largest imprisoned population. As for soldiers, their wars kill people by the millions.
Not news. Sounds like you’re trying to normalize MAGA’s quota driven, race-profiling, warrant bypassing, masked ICE. No such thing existed when employees joined Boston Dynamics.
The exact opposite. I’m trying to tell you that the US is an evil country and always has been, long before MAGA.
It has one of the most violent police forces in the world, the most violent military in the world, and that is who they were making robot dogs for before ICE. That’s why this is so ridiculous, they’re acting like their hands were clean before.
I would not expect any country to give up police and defence. But I think ICE can return to what it was before MAGA. I’m willing to criticize MAGA and their ICE, but not the US as a whole.
I have bad news about capitalist manufacturers…
You know all of these dorks love cyberpunk stuff too lol
I think robots should be destroyed every chance we get. What would philadelphia do? Ask yourself that. (hitchhiking robot went like all over the world, then pissed someone(s) off in philly and they junked her.)
I don’t know if that’s the takeaway from that story.
I read the title multiple times and really thought they were trying to put spurs on robot dogs.
No they are buying the spurs from the dog
And just what in the fuck did you think the autonomous robot dogs were going to be used for, exactly??
Boston Dynamics has been very upfront about the fact that they’ve been developing the robot dogs for “police and military” applications. This protest is performative; they’ve known exactly what they’re doing for a very long time.
Workers at Terminator factory upset that Terminators being sold to people who love Terminating
No, you don’t understand! The company said we were designing our robots to be able to hold a gun, so that it could use seed cannons to autonomously plant trees! So that it could use squirtguns to fight fires! So that it could play laser tag with children! Why would they lie about something like that?
…aaaand now the workers have been Terminated. Problem solved.
I thought Black Mirror nailed it.
The real helpful usage could be a pack animal type carrier, but I dont think that causes enough Pain and Suffering^^tm^^ to appease the overlords.
Which episode?
Edit: Someone posted this
Season 4 episode 5: metalhead
Thanks!
They thought they would be used in other countries. Not theirs
I thought they were for parimutual racing events
Well, they ain’t gonna do much. For $1.3M they’re only getting 3 or 4. You couldn’t control my little redneck town with 4 robots.
Are we supposed to believe those employees weren’t aware of Boston Dynamics long history of being funded by DARPA with the explicit intent of employing their robots for state use?
https://www.darpa.mil/node/2035
https://www.darpa.mil/about/innovation-timeline/atlas-robot-debut
There are legit uses, such as bomb disposal and military scouting. At one point their ads focussed on carrying supplies
But this is not one of those
Did they think they were just for dancing?
DARPA is not ICE. They have different focuses geographically, politically, technically, and culturally.
One kills brown people abroad and the other one kills brown people internally
They are really going to be used for one thing: walking flock surveillance. They are going to be deployed around neighborhoods to see who they can spot that’s latino looking enough or who’s simply on their suspect list. Wanna bet if they will get the local police departments to deploy them for ICE as well? They will spot suspects, build a profile, and when they have enough ICE moves in.
Sorry but what the fuck did they think they were making these stupid ass things for
I guess some people see a difference between using them to hunt poor brown people in the middle east, and using them to hunt down poor brown people (or better yet,
protestetsenemies of the state) in USA.Clearly these and the humanoid robot, were always just going to be used as machines of war, wether it be domestically or internationally.
I’m sorry, where do you get the idea these are made for war? Is that what you think whenever you see a machine shop or a hardware aisle?
First thing I thought when I saw these robot dogs years ago was “gun platform”
Where do you get the idea that these aren’t for war?
Why else would the Department of War (Formerly Defence) have dumped $123m into the company over the last 18 years?
Fair point but there’s a huge gap between “this company receives DOD funding” and “these robots are designed to hurt people”.
I’ve worked in robotics and I’ve worked for companies that have accepted government contracts. Funding can be challenging in the robotics industry so using gov contracts to develop generally applicable technology is tempting. I would never work on a system designed to hurt people, and I want to give the engineers at Boston Dynamics the benefit of the doubt that I would want.
Spot and Atlas both look like glorified tech demos to me. I have a hard time imagining them as any kind of effective weapons platform, even though they can look uncanny-valley scary. Especially when we already have effective robot weapons: drone with a bomb.
The gap may be huge morally but it’s very narrow in practice. The problem is that general purpose includes any purpose, including murder. It’s rather different from airborne drones because it can be much stealthier and can simply move into position in advance, wait in silence and strike without warning and like drones it is effectively disposable so there would be very little form of effective defense against such tactics deployed at scale, but qualitative differences like that aren’t really the main point we should be concerned about. The point is, we cannot ignore the extreme, profound danger these technologies pose to the protection and continued functioning of human civilization simply because it is not designed for it. It may be too late to stop it completely, but that’s absolutely no excuse for leaving it unchecked and allowing it to run rampant.
Nuclear weapons technology never stopped developing, but as humans, we all agreed it was too dangerous to let proliferate freely, and we have kept it in check and so far managed to avoid annihilating ourselves with it. It may not be the greatest success story, but it is the best we’ve been able to do, and there’s no reason not to keep trying, if the alternative is annihilation, and I believe in both cases it is.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. Yeah I’ve seen the Ghost Robotics prototype and I’m not a fan.
I agree with you about keeping a watchful eye on the potential dangers of developing technologies. My original point was simply to add nuance to the “robot = weapon” reaction. These things are tools. A knife can prepare food or inflict harm.
I think these days all of the new tech seems shitty or scary because of societal issues. Like how the absolute worst people in the world are in charge of these companies.
Yeah I agree with you here. A general use diaster response robot is just naturally going to have a lot of overlap with a general use war support robot. It becomes a complicated issue and what we would hope would be the stop gap of intelligent and responsible goverment oversight and regulation is of course malevolent and entirely captured by greed and nefarious interests.
Ideally all the robotics and AI people would rebel and we would install some utopic democracy built on human prosperity and freedom, but it’s a hard coordination problem to solve and the deck is stacked against us.
Fair point but there’s a huge gap between “this company receives DOD funding” and “these robots are designed to hurt people”.
No there’s not, lmao
Thanks, we are all enlightened by your contribution. 👍
Any time! It’s easy!
God it must be peaceful to be this naive.
Must be nice to be so confident in your worldview
My worldview that the United States’ technology breakthroughs will be used to kill civilians across the globe? Yeah I don’t have to worry about being wrong, pretty much ever about that, lol.
This is an obvious overaimplification though. Many medical breakthroughs have been made in the US that have benefited people widely. But I agree that AI and robotics is going to lead to more suffering and oppression on its current trajectory.
I think they got too used to mines and other industries using them for lidar inspections and forgot that they were literally working for a defence contractor.
“Defense” Contractor? The 20th Century called, they want their “Woke” terminology back. These guys contract with “The department of War” now.
Does that mean we can start calling them “death merchants” again?
Sure. You’ll get no objections from me.
defenceoffence
Search-and-rescue operations in a hostile environment (e.g. Fukushima nuclear accident)
Are they actually radiation-hardened though? My understanding was that robots for radioactive work tend to be extremely simplistic because of that limitation, and you probably don’t want a radioactive particle flipping a bit that makes the dog decide now would be a great time to do a backflip into the spent fuel pool.
@cecilkorik No, they are not. The most rad hard robots survive only a short time in places like the melted Fukushima reactors.
Did anyone actually believe that?
Man, these T-1 Terminators are sweet! They have Vulcan gatling guns on them! Just think of all the flowers you can put in the barrels!
I was forced to sit through a military tech demo at a school I went to, and they showed off using Boston dynamics type dogs for “rescue”. But I think we all knew where that was going as soon as it had anything to do with military. The Boston Dynamics employees have to be delusional to think this wasn’t on the cards.
Exactly
My exact thoughts
Exactly.
Sometimes I worry that maybe the state doesn’t have our best interests in mind 👉👈
It’s people like you that require state to have robodogs with machine gun turrets on them.
“Oh no, the all-purpose machine we made is being used for one of those purposes that was predicted by just about every scifi ever!”
They’re just protesting to virtue signal.
Here at Torment Nexus we’re appalled that our company is going to sell the newest Torment Nexus to an organization that wants to use it to torment. We thought our management would act differently. After all, they’ve read “Don’t Build the Torment Nexus” just like we have and they know the risks of the Torment Nexus getting into the wrong hands.
Dr. Venture: Weapon? What are you talking about? Why the applications are limitless.
UN Science Director: Are you kidding me? You blew up a model city with it. What are we suppose to think? Look, it even melted all the little people and stuff. Awww.
Dr. Venture: Well, I suppose if it ever fell into the wrong hands it could be modified and used as a weapon after a fashion. But thats true of almost any technology.
