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Atlas robot does parkour

blog.bostondynamics.com

171–180 of 242 posts

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#171

”If robots can eventually respond to their environments with the same level of dexterity as the average adult human, the range of potential applications will be practically limitless. ‘Humanoids are interesting from a couple perspectives,’ Kuindersma says. “First, they capture our vision of a go-anywhere, do-anything robot of the future. They may not be the best design for any particular task, but if you wanted to bu…

Webster uses humanoid robots as an example usage of 'humanoid'. The word just means it has a human-like shape, ie. two arms and two legs connected to a torso.

Definition of humanoid

(Entry 1 of 2) : having human form or characteristics

// humanoid dentition

// humanoid robots

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humanoid

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#172
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will we? It's not as if there is some countermeasure that will magically even the playing field, things seem to advance in the direction of escalation vs countermeasure.

I'm mildly surprised that in all the "AI goes rogue and turns a controlled smart munition into a murder-bot" fiction I've seen, I don't think anyone has drawn the relatively short line of causality along "Drone countermeasures disrupt remote control --> designers build in some basic decision-making to account for control interruption --> the decision-making gets sophisticated enough that it's trusted with kill / no-k…

A system that has intolerable friendly-fire issues would not be used longer than it takes to learn about the issues.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#173
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We were depersonalized by the industrial revolution, and then large numbers of us were killed in the wars that followed. We were depersonalized loooong before that - read up on the 30 years war, or any other conflict before the Industrial Revolution. “Soldiers” of the time were mercenaries, many of whom were pressed in to ‘service’ when their village/town/farm was destroyed by said mercenary company. These mercenar…

Sometimes we forget that the last 3-5 generations were the only humans in history for whom seeing a sibling die in childhood was not the norm. Instead of the industrial revolution dehumanizing us, for the first time ever we are raised from birth confident that we will live long and prosperous lives, that we need not kill nor fear being killed to live in this prosperity. Human life has become much more precious and ch…

whats also easily forgotten is just how many people are alive right now.

the current estimate is that there have roughly been 105 billion birth since 50 000BC, with our current world population at almost 8 billion... about 8% of all humans that have ever lived are currently still alive.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#174
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see this. Especially robot armies marching back into the middle east. I can also see robot caregivers for the elderly. Or in cities built for pedestrians a robot walking next to you carrying your shopping bags or escorting your kids to school with a live video feed back to the parents. Fire trucks pulling up and 50 robots jumping out and running into a burning building to carry people out. Could go either way…

Or, rather than any of these special-purpose autonomous robots, the most likely outcome: fully-articulated telepresence robots, allowing people using VR to do anything a human could physically do, remotely. That covers pretty much all of the above use-cases and more, without assuming advances in high-level strategic AI; just good low-level motor-model learning as already exists here, plus good Internet and input meth…

Don't forget

1) carrying enough energy

2) getting the price point down to what people are prepared to pay

for telepresence.

These are very tough indeed.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#175
post #18

What can I do to defend myself against killer robots? Seriously, is there something simple that I can put in my glovebox of my car to use in case these robots start getting scary? Is there a simple household good that will work well against these, until they start explicitly shielding against stuff?

Why are these nonsense fantasy world comments so common here?

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#177
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s kind of hard to fling paint, but I guess just making a potato gun that spits out paint should be good. I’ll be looking for some Holi festival type gear.

Or a paintball gun.

Good idea but when I used them the balls were fairly small and not very accurate. So hitting cameras might be tough to do completely enough to block visit.

Is there a paintball shotgun?

Yes, there are [0]. But it seems like they shoot “slugs” and not a spray of paint in a cone.

[0] https://paintballglobe.com/paintball-shotgun/

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#178
post #8

I'm not a particularly pessimistic person in general, but I don't know ...this tech, while cool, feels like the precursor to a worse future in general. Maybe I've seen too much sci-fi, but these robots look like optimizing for future soldiers, law enforcement etc. Given all the other Self-Driving / Facial Recognition / Loss of Privacy / Deepfake / "AI is bad at recognizing $situation"-type posts, and as all these tec…

Oh I can imagine non violent uses. One of these to do my laundry, dishes, perhaps cooking, wash the car, clean the bathroom, generally tidy up and so on would be pretty good. Keep it humanoid so it can work in the same space as me, then it can fold itself into a box or something when not working.

A special-purpose scope-limited robot probably washes your dishes already. What remains is putting them in and out of your current robot. Dextrous manipulation is tough, and likely to be very expensive for a while.

Amazon currently pays people to fill boxes for a good economic reason.

Re: Atlas robot does parkour

#180
post #18

What can I do to defend myself against killer robots? Seriously, is there something simple that I can put in my glovebox of my car to use in case these robots start getting scary? Is there a simple household good that will work well against these, until they start explicitly shielding against stuff?

Why are these nonsense fantasy world comments so common here?

For me, my interest is in sort of lateral thinking for any problem. For novel situations, I like to think of what the positive and negative impacts are and particularly what “hacks” might be able to get unexpected outcomes.

I’m typically like this for everything, but for robots that can jump around and stuff (and will likely soon do police and military actions) this is novel enough for me to explore this for the first time.

I think similarly about facial recognition software for how to evade and confuse. And also for biometrics, locks, etc. Any of these things are interesting to me and I want to know how to do stuff with them.

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