Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a chapter in one of the Great Brain books where their family is the first in town to get an indoor flush toilet. Everyone else is agog--why would you want a filthy, stinky outhouse inside your house?
Sure. Now imagine the toilet came as a subscription service, with DRM restricting you to premium brands of toilet paper and cleaning products, and built-in sensors that secretly analyze the chemical composition of your excrement, collecting data which the vendor sends to advertisers. Oh, and the toilet is always connected, which means it'll stop working if you lose power, Internet, or if the vendor abandons it or goe…
Do You Love Me? [video]
391–400 of 478 posts
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
My sister used live next to the Boston Dynamics facility in Waltham. She'd walk her on the nearby river path and generally disliked the way Boston Dynamics would periodically take over the path and keep her from using. Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Bos…
Great comment! So many, at least from my reckoning online, seem to assume complex AI is just a given and we'll have it soon enough, but the reality is that these things are mostly puppets and the kinds of brains you need to come up with a clever song and dance on your own as opposed to having one carefully programmed into you is night and day. I think there's a reason we don't have mini, less capable, robots like the…
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#393If 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…
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Hydraulics make robot motion look fake? Have you watched real robots move before? I've never once watched a robot move and thought to myself "that looks fake". This is how the robot moves IN REALITY: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhND7Mvp3f4
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
My sister used live next to the Boston Dynamics facility in Waltham. She'd walk her on the nearby river path and generally disliked the way Boston Dynamics would periodically take over the path and keep her from using. Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. The reason Bos…
>Part of the reason the robots evoke little excitement is because after a short look, you can realize they're just large puppets. I think it's more like the Feynman example of how a scientist may look at a flower. A person may see a full-size puppet when they see a choreographed robot, but all I can think about is how complicated the mechanisms -- software and hardware -- must be in order to dynamically balance a rob…
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. If someone wants to "hunt" you with a robot they can already do so with a UAV (think MQ-1 Predator, not an off-the-shelf quadrocopter). It is an already existing true and tested technology. Large governments around the world already maintain literal armies to maintain them and efficiently employ them to kill people. The fact that that weapon is not aimed at you or me is merely a political decision. With legged r…
Bombs cause infinitely bigger international uproars for good reasons. Robot assassins that cannot die change the calculus. Governments don't have to risk losing their human assets in order to take out a target. They can just send out a 4-legged drone to prick them with polonium and call it a day.
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wonder to what extent this is pre-programmed. Surely the engineers gave some sort of high level description, and let the robots figure out the rest. Also, it's probably not possible to acount for all the variability of the environment beforehand, so the "recording" played back does not contain every move to the last detail.
They would have specified target trajectories. Then a solver tries to make that happen.
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed about fixing wages. I’m left-centrist and I find some of the extreme Marxism after the pandemic concerning. That’s what I’m rebutting against. I’m strongly against UBI, but I want high taxes for anyone making over $X. X is open for debate. I’d like temporary UBI (6 months, that’s what we have currently with unemployment benefits) + free apprenticeship like training so people can get back on employment. UBI is…
And it'll make no difference, all these wealthy don't have salary to tax or often time even cash, it's quite often wrapped up in the companies they've started or made super successful. This is the point that seems so blatantly missed. Increasing taxes shouldn't be the one jerk reaction because there is scant evidence that governments are remotely effective at using the money we already give them hand over fist. I sup…
> healthy would have had a chance to flourish
There can be no healthy hospitality businesses during the pandemic.
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe I misunderstood your comment but there are definitely videos of people interacting with Atlas (the bipedal robot) to the point that it's a running joke that they'll remember said interactions. See https://youtu.be/rVlhMGQgDkY?t=83
Re: Do You Love Me? [video]
#400Earlier 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…
Which "we"? Which millions? Do you mean in China?