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Do You Love Me? [video]

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Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#291

Post by GavinMcG »

fermienrico wrote: post #238
pjc50 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The great tech leaps of the mid20th century resulted in huge material improvements for huge numbers of people. The worry is that the benefits will no longer spread. And the robots in particular have a century of being hollywood villains to overcome.

What makes you think benefits won’t spread? We’re on track to producing vaccines by the billions, the biggest mobilization and logistical effort in the history of mankind. Good luck buying a vaccine and cutting the line, even if you have $10k to spare. I think the risk that the wealthiest few will rule the world is largely misplaced and overblown. We’ve lifted millions out of poverty and made tremendous progress in l…

Even prior to the pandemic, real wages were stagnant for decades. Wealth inequality has been a growing problem since before many of us have been alive, at this point.

We are definitely making progress in absolute terms, but there is plenty of good reason to be concerned about the benefits spreading in general, and particularly when we're talking about technologies to replace labor.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#292

Post by iambrj »

fartcannon wrote: post #156
ve55 wrote: post #138

It's hard to believe that they were acquired for 'only' 1.1B, given the valuations we have seen of many other companies recently.

Bipedal robots will replace human labour and the first person to make them inexpensive will become unfathomably wealthy. How much did slack go for? 30 billion? For a shiny chat client with fewer features than the 25 year old tech they ape.

> How much did slack go for? 30 billion? For a shiny chat client with fewer features than the 25 year old tech they ape.

IMO they pay for the customer base more than the app itself.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#293

Post by joshspankit »

imglorp wrote: post #107
roughly wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree that if anyone except BD put out this video I’d bin it as fake immediately. I still have a hard time saying I believe it - it feels like such a jump from where my mental model of their robots was and CGI is so good at this point that it feels easier for this to be a fake than real.

It might help to compare against video with less editing and effects. Several youtubers are playing with Spots and you can get a better idea of what they're really like. Adam Savage: https://youtu.be/-R8wUybrspo?t=2374 Marques Brownlee: https://youtu.be/s6_azdBnAlU?t=249

It does, but counterpoint: unassisted (no help balancing) bipedal motion has been a holy grail for a looong time, where 4-legged is child's play by comparison. This could mean that just the bipedals are faked.

It would help a lot more to compare footage with real-world people interacting with the bipedal robot.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#294

Post by kristopolous »

fermienrico wrote: post #196
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s all very cool looking. However when I watched this video my first thought was “my god they’re going to bring the drone wars to the ground.” I am a robotics engineer and have been focused on robotics my whole life. I worked at Google X on a robotics team with some great ex-Boston Dynamics people, and some of my friends have since gone to work for them. So I do understand what they have achieved. It’s fantastic fr…

It's weird to pick one point in the abstraction chain of human technological progress and create a threshold of unethical behavior. Technological progress will gaurantee this scenario of military use. If not BD, it will be another company. If not now, it will. If not the US, it will be someone else - China, Russia, etc. I don't see anypoint in feeling sad about just some geeks making robots as much as we didn't becom…

ah the " If not us, it will be someone else " argument.

Let's replace that with other things to show how incorrect this logic is.

"If we don't enslave these people, someone else will"

"If we don't bomb these schools, by golly, someone else will!"

The potential hypothetical existence of others acting immorally simply isn't a valid ethical argument to act immorally.

In the same way the response is "how about if instead nobody bombs the hospital" the response here is "how about if instead nobody builds armies of killer robots"

"no death cyborgs" sounds like a pretty easy ask for humanity. This should be well within reach.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#295

Post by ryandrake »

tehjoker wrote: post #270
fermienrico wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think benefits won’t spread? We’re on track to producing vaccines by the billions, the biggest mobilization and logistical effort in the history of mankind. Good luck buying a vaccine and cutting the line, even if you have $10k to spare. I think the risk that the wealthiest few will rule the world is largely misplaced and overblown. We’ve lifted millions out of poverty and made tremendous progress in l…

WW2 was bigger. The lack of mobilization is the hallmark of this crisis. The vaccines are the only bright point in sight.

To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later, hoping the vaccines will save us, and everyone is still out horsing around, spreading the disease everywhere.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#296

Post by plutonorm »

bozzcl wrote: post #87

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…

My cofounders are oblivious.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#297

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

brmgb wrote: post #239
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BD is basic research. Figuring out what can be done and what the potential applications are. I’m surprised BD has gone through so many sales. Whoever owns them in the end is going to make a ton of money I reckon.

In the case of BD, the question seems to be what exactly is the end. Making walking robots is an incredible feet of engineering but one that doesn't seem to solve an actual industrial problem. For a lot of use, as a mean of locomotion, they are fighting not only tracks but also flying now that multicopters are ubiquitous. Is there still a market for them? Cool research anyway.

Robotics already has plenty of applications. Travelling over dangerous terrain for mapping, search and rescue, automation of manufacturing where dexterity is required, lifting and manoeuvring heavy loads. Those few applications alone covers a lot of industries.

But you might also learn about how to build prosthetics, augment human abilities with exoskeletons. Who knows.

These guys will figure out all the obvious stuff and perfect it. And then see how far they can push it.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#298

Post by ChuckMcM »

As someone who is on record saying this wouldn't be possible, I'm pretty amazed (I believe the technical term is gobsmacked) :-). That said, the ability to manage this with essentially "shadow mode" is somewhat less impressive than having the kinematics "built in" so to speak. As I understand it (and correct me if you have more recent data!) the robots are programmed by using a person wearing an articulated sensor network to capture the motion[1]. The robots repeat what ever the person does.

There are lots of interesting domestic uses for this kind of capability. In California it would be interesting to see if they could be used to fight fires. Even if the kinematics where programmed and they were launched with a 'follow' drone, I could imagine a 3rd Person game type UI for fire fighters who could take over control and "drive them" like they would a video game. That would enable a much larger fire fighting crew to be deployed.

[1] FWIW 'training mode' for workstation robots has been a thing for ever where an operator manually moves the robot through the steps it needs to do, then tweaks the program after running it. Fixed problems like "pick up a part in any orientation, then put it into this orientation" are part of the robots built in moves.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#299

Post by joshspankit »

espadrine wrote: post #38
sxp wrote: post #4

If I didn't know who Boston Dynamics was, I would have said that this is just CGI. The animations look so fake. I think the issue is that they're aggressively smoothing the motion since mechanical systems don't have the ability to accelerate & jerk as fast as biological systems. Cheap mocap animation has the same problem because the frame rate of the capture system is too low. They interpolate between captured keyfra…

> The animations look so fake. Let’s talk about why it looks fake. I think it comes from the use of hydraulics. Biological muscle is way less linear (it works more like a second-order control system, where things often overshoot their target before dampening). But one part of it may also be algorithmic: the robot’s Kalman filter (?) may correct for errors from sensor fusion much faster than a human would. I would lov…

For me, the front toe taps are especially fake-looking. It’s hard to pin down exactly without going frame by frame, but to me it feels like it‘s a combination of the lighting and the way the foot “rests” on the floor (which should probably be deforming since it looks like dense foam?)

Almost as though they had to edit out some balance-assisting device.

Also: why are the people at the right speed, but it feels like the robots are sped up? Them being sped up would be fine, but if the two are at different speeds then it’s a clear indicator that it’s composited.

Re: Do You Love Me? [video]

#300

Post by plutonorm »

joe_the_user wrote: post #226
reportingsjr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it. Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watc…

>> robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. > I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. Oh, I'd love to see that change. That would be a change in reality, not perception. It wouldn't force me to change my belief that as things stand now, walking have been an ongoing failure and disapp…

Most people think like you do. But then again most people are blindsided by revolutionary change.
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