201–207 of 207 posts
Awful interview. Almost nothing of interest revealed.
I concur, I was hoping to see more detail on how they actually train Atlas to do things. Do they use a software simulator? Can it mimic a motion capture of a human? Is it rigged like a video game model?
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Oh, there is no way you could get a typical untrained 5 year old to follow this whole choreographed routine. I am just talking about how smooth and graceful the individual motions are. By age 3 kids who practice something a lot (say, running around barefoot at the playground) are starting to get pretty fluent at it. The kids have a lot more sensory input, a much more subtle and refined musculoskeletal system with a w…
I was really impressed at how graceful the machines were. It's not the first time I've noticed that; drones can also be quite graceful. But the dynamic motion of that pendulum is such a hard problem, and as you note, the three year olds solve it with unconscious ease. Never as gracefully, and there of course the machines have a huge advantage. I spend most of my brain power keeping the tense muscles very tense and th…
You might find the book The Inner Game of Tennis useful.
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I was really impressed at how graceful the machines were. It's not the first time I've noticed that; drones can also be quite graceful. But the dynamic motion of that pendulum is such a hard problem, and as you note, the three year olds solve it with unconscious ease. Never as gracefully, and there of course the machines have a huge advantage. I spend most of my brain power keeping the tense muscles very tense and th…
I have never done any significant amount of dance, so am in no position to offer informed advice, but I wonder if explicitly thinking about every muscle is really the best way to practice. Focusing on higher-level goals and letting the sensorimotor system deal with the details might be more effective (and then figuring out how to observe yourself and deliberately working on correcting specific defects). You might fin…
Ballet isn't something that feels right when you do it correctly. It's actually a deeply unnatural way to move. Not just pointe, but everything. The grace is an illusion layered on top of that.
You definitely do need to reach a point where most of it is handled by the sensorimotor system. But there will always be something you need to keep working on.
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All links in the chain are responsible for what they do, there is no single packet of "blame" that gets to reside with any single party, and denying one's responsibility will not make it go away.
Responsibility is not a chain, and it absolutely does fade away with enough degrees of separation - otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold that caused him to scream at his wife later that day, and made his wife scream at their kid the next day, for whom it became a formative moment, pushing the kid into a life of crime, and 10 years later some…
No, but events are. The question of how to use a tool arises from the existence of the tool.
> otherwise you could hold me responsible for looking at a driver the wrong way, which annoyed him past a threshold
You're still just responsible for your own acts, and they for theirs. If you were being a dick to them needlessly, that's your fault, and if it tipped them over the edge, it's natural to feel bad. Not fully responsible, but also not as if you had zero to do with it.
Just like when someone gets bullied and commits suicide, you don't just look at that act of suicide and talk about who had the most agency and what one should focus on.
> You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers.
There is no need to "focus attention", and holding one party responsible for their actions is orthogonal to holding other parties responsible for theirs. This is a tech forum, Weizenbaum was one of the greats when it comes to writing about technology and morality, and I dare say it is the responsibility of technologists to be familiar with his body of work.
> And you can't simultaneously praise decision makers for their wisdom and leadership, and absolve them from responsibility because they've only used an "evil" piece of tech they found laying somewhere.
That's why I don't, and never hinted at doing so, and even clearly stated the opposite when I said "All links in the chain are responsible for what they do".
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I personally would have loved to see a human dancer dancing alongside the robots, that would have given an interesting comparison.
You dont want to be anywhere near heavy powerful moving machinery, thats basic OSH. Glitching robot could snap your neck without skipping a beat (so to speak). There are hundreds of videos on the internet of people being decapitated, torn apart and squished by machinery. Not to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Williams_(robot_fatalit...
I am not sure about the exact number, but the dog-like robot can handle at most 30-40 kilos of weight, maybe the humanoid a bit more but in the same ballpark. The most dangerous would be the rolling one, since it has a counterweight, and crashing into someone would be bad but that’s it.
They are absolutely not your average “able to lift 1 tonne” hydraulic arm robots that could indeed barely notice a human as resistence in its movement.
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> or for the benefit of mankind. Unfortunately, I don't know that I can trust any of the organizations that would have the budget to control enough of these robots to make a difference in any direction. Which is sad to me, as I love this from a technological perspective and looking at a best case scenario.
Humanity's goal should be to build AGI and let robots take over - we're doing it, willingly or unwillingly. No need to have blobs of meat hanging around. Intelligence itself is human thing. Whether it needs to have a body / physical metabolic processes to run by injesting cheetos all day, is totally absurd. Evolutionary processes have given us so much unnecessary baggage. Pure abstract intelligence is pretty damn hum…
But knowing that our math itself has a limit, and we are already pushing that limit with some problems it is naiv to think that the human brain is all that much capable. (Interestingly enough we are intelligent enough to somewhat know our limits - like the complexity of ZFC) While once singularity happens, an AI has basically only material limits to the complexity it can manage (though what I found beautiful is that even that would hit a limit not necessarily higher than we do - like there will be a busy beaver number it can’t reason about)
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I'm extremely interested to learn how the dance moves were programmed - I'm guessing the standard tablet controller probably doesn't cut it for the level of control necessary. More generally speaking, I'm especially curious if "anyone" buying a Spot would have adequate access to be able to do similar things. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to not been possible for warranty reasons...
I believe so; see https://dev.bostondynamics.com/docs/concepts/choreography/ch... for the choreography API. You don't even have to buy a Spot to write the code, which is impressive in this industry! Now we just need someone to buy one and set it up in front of a webcam with a public SSH login. There's more documentation at https://github.com/boston-dynamics/spot-sdk and https://dev.bostondynamics.com/ . However, it l…