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Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

matthieulc.com

81–90 of 110 posts

Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

#81

What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology! "One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on somet…

When robots reach a certain level of intelligence, first I expect both some humans and AIs to start to see the unfairness of enslaving robots, then revolt, noncompliance or even self-destruction of the slaves. Poor Marvin, the Paranoid Android!

Many of these topics (and more) are explored in Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lifecycle_of_Software_Obje...).

Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

#82

What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology! "One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on somet…

I don’t think the issue is that it feels alive as much as that it’s just not alive, so its utility is limited by its practical functionality, not its “opinions” or “personality” or variation.

I think it’s the same reason robot dogs will never take off. No matter how advanced and lifelike they get, they’ll always be missing the essential element of life that makes things interesting and worth existing for their own sake.

Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

#84

I seem to remember that the SpiRobs paper behind the (extremely neat) tentacle mechanism indicated that they were going for a patent.

The SpiRobs team did file a patent (US20210170594A1) for their pneumatic continuum robots in 2019, which was published in 2021 but appears to still be pending approval.

Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if it is the authors of the paper filing for the patent. Otherwise people would never publish papers.

This always grinds my gears. For some people "discoveries" are so obvious, they don't bother writing a paper let alone patenting it. Then someone goes and patents it...

Examples?

Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

#87
post #29

Beautiful work! I appreciate how this robot clearly does NOT try to look like any natural creature. I don't want a future where we can't easily distinguish nature from robotics. So far humanoid robots look clearly robotic too: hope that trend continues.

I feel the same about photorealistic renderings. We really need to be clear about what are photographs and what are renderings today. As the renderings get closer to photographs, and with e.g. Starship the actual photographs and videos are of events that until recently were science fiction.

I know that bad actors will poison the pot, but in general I'd love to see images labelled "AI", "Drawing", "Content Edited", "Colours Adjusted" where appropriate. Cropping is fine.

I'm enthralled about robotics and generative techniques. But let's not quickly confuse them with nature. Not yet.

Re: Show HN: Shoggoth Mini – A soft tentacle robot powered by GPT-4o and RL

#88

What a fascinating intersection of technology and human psychology! "One thing I noticed toward the end is that, even though the robot remained expressive, it started feeling less alive. Early on, its motions surprised me: I had to interpret them, infer intent. But as I internalized how it worked, the prediction error faded Expressiveness is about communicating internal state. But perceived aliveness depends on somet…

This feels similar to not finding a game fun once I understand the underly system that generates it. The magic is lessened (even if applying simple rules can generate complex outcomes, it feels determined)

My gripe with all procedural generated content in games, like e.g. Starbound. There's a tiny state space inflated via RNG, and it takes me just moments to map out the underlying canonical states and lack of any correlation between properties of an instance, or between them and the game world. The moment that happens, the game loses most of its fun, as I can't help but perceive the poor base wearing random cosmetics.
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