91–95 of 95 posts
It actually makes me think of a robot horse more than a dog. Does that mean in 20 years we'll all be riding robot horses around? Once again, the Japanese are way ahead of us... http://www.absoluteanime.com/saber_rider/index.gif
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Well, not necessarily. Those devices aren't biped specific- they're specific to thing with grasping mechanisms. Who's to say a quadruped robot can't have 4 feet + 1 or 2 grapsing mechanisms? Or have two front feet that are also capable of grasping?
While you can certainly have a 4 legged robot, 2 armed helping you around the house or a hospital, only using grasping mechanisms to climb the ladder to adjust the satellite dish on the roof, help you with the dishes, or get you out of bed, I think it's important to consider the reaction people have to a robot's form factor given its job. You and I might think it's really cool to have 4 feet and two arms (like a cent…
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Robots on the battlefield doesn't spook me at all. It seems to me to be an improvement over sending people to risk their lives.
This is an overly simplistic and dangerous view of warfare. Increasingly, warfare is not about soldiers being sent to fight each other in some empty battlefield. The pattern of U.S. wars since WWII has been expeditionary warfare where the U.S. sends its troops to fight with irregular forces, among civilians of other countries. No war is clean, but this is a particularly evil setup, because the worst that American non…
There are only two ways to prevent conflict: 1. be reasonable in all of your negotiations and 2. make sure you are always ready for a conflict.
If you fail to do the first, others may see no choice but to fight you. If you fail to do the second, they may not see any downside to it. This boils down to one principle, you must always back every one of your demands, even the reasonable one which you have a right to, with sufficient force.
In short, there is nothing wrong with using machines to do our fighting for us. There is something wrong with killing civilians and unnecessarily invading foreign countries; but there is nothing wrong with using better weapons to do the same job.
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This is an overly simplistic and dangerous view of warfare. Increasingly, warfare is not about soldiers being sent to fight each other in some empty battlefield. The pattern of U.S. wars since WWII has been expeditionary warfare where the U.S. sends its troops to fight with irregular forces, among civilians of other countries. No war is clean, but this is a particularly evil setup, because the worst that American non…
The reason Europeans are not as accepting of warfare is because they screwed themselves over twice with it. War is always the last resort of negotiation. When nations become too belligerent or stubborn conflict will always follow. Europe forgot this lesson twice in as many generations and suffered the consequences. There are only two ways to prevent conflict: 1. be reasonable in all of your negotiations and 2. make s…
You're assuming that these two issues are independent. I'm proposing that handing our rulers robot warriors will result in harder-to-expose killing of civilians and more unnecessary invasions.
Of course, if all the killer robots were working for me, I would deploy them wisely and reduce civilians deaths.
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You just did see a video of one of the most advanced prototypes(!) of a robot and you think it will fail because such things are not yet seen in mass market? Somehow that made me smile :)
How many planes have you seen in people's driveways? The mass market is not a sign of success, all products have to start somewhere. These robots will remain the realm of military and rescue missions because they have so many damn moving parts. Quality control is what drives up prices and quality control is exponentially linked to moving parts. So my argument is more along the lines of: "This robot is technologically…
And the first application which did spring to my mind immediately was transport. There are so many situations where an automated transport, which does not depend on wheels or rails, would be useful that I can see a huge market for this.
The first mass market might be in the industry. But once prices fall there are also lots of possibilities for this to reach the consumer market. Certainly normal people also can have uses for such transports. Be it as intelligent luggage, as a tool for the garden (replacing the wheelbarrow) or simply as a very cool toy for the kids (just think of riding those things!).
This is a completely new way of automating transports and so I expect it to have an extremely large impact in the following years.