151–160 of 478 posts
It's hard to believe that they were acquired for 'only' 1.1B, given the valuations we have seen of many other companies recently.
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Oof. I don’t know how sad it is. Slap some guns on them and they’ll start selling. I kind of hope they stick to dancing and novelty tricks.
Bipedal robots aren't a great match for battlefield situations because they lack the ability to do proper decision making and are very expensive. The dogs might be more usable, but even then modern conflicts are not really based on ground war. I don't think those have any significant value over a an actual drone. Now a fleet of tiny quad-motor drones with a few bullets? That could work in high-density urban environme…
It's hard to believe that they were acquired for 'only' 1.1B, given the valuations we have seen of many other companies recently.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, thanks for sharing the song. Haven't heard it in a while. I was listening to Chick Corea's 80s material earlier today though. That era had a lot of cheesy sounding jazz fusion that I can't get enough of!
I'm mostly a rock and roll and metal head, but I listened to a lot of Chick Corea in the 80's, like the Where Have I Known You Before album from his Return to Forever band. These days, I use a Canadian streaming service called Stingray Music. There, I just discovered a channel called "For the fans of Weather Report". It streams all that sort of stuff nonstop. Mahavishnu, Hancock, ...
I'm happy John Mclaughlin is still playing. Here's a song from a couple weeks ago you might like!
I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again." In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously…
It's hard to believe that they were acquired for 'only' 1.1B, given the valuations we have seen of many other companies recently.
How much did slack go for? 30 billion? For a shiny chat client with fewer features than the 25 year old tech they ape.
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I kind of wish there was a reason to be afraid, but I don’t think AI is anywhere near that.
You don’t need true AI to make this thing deadly or oppressive. You don’t need an AI that ponders the meaning of life for you. You just need a smart Decision and Control System (DCS). Paired with additional technology for facial and gait recognition, obstacle avoidance, path planning, and you have all the hallmarks of a rudimentary hunter-killer bot. What Boston Dynamics cracked here, is the physical control mechanis…
As someone who worked in robotics at CMU in the mid 80s with Whittaker, & Raibert, and Crowley this was definitely super exciting to watch. You've come a long way baby. I remember watching you great, great grandfather hopping around in Raibert's lab in 1984. Yeah, and sort of scary.
Really scary. Whenever I see the latest Boston Dynamics video, I’m always thinking ‘and now imagine it’s hunting you’.
I mean, I guess better a robot than a person.. but still.. pretty terrifying to think we are soon to have people hunting robots.
So what's the main barrier to using these industrially? Is it reliability? Did this video a zillion takes? Is it manufacturing? Maybe it's hard to scale them up? Is it battery life? Maybe it can power itself for just a few minutes? Is it object manipulation or sensing/world understanding? Maybe it can't apply the right forces to a soft thing or a flexible thing or know what it can step on vs over or what will move or…
I'm not sure what you mean by "industrially". In actual factories, which are highly controlled environments, the things called robots are much simpler and more specialized. So you're "Is it just that anything worth automating is worth specializing, and there are better robots for different specific tasks?" point is more or less it. But also consider, while these bipedal, quadrupedal and wheeled robots can do all sort…