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I thought it was less about "creepy" and more about the military aspect. It's hard to "don't be evil" when you have a subsidiary building what people were descr
by vosper 9y ago
I thought it was less about "creepy" and more about the military aspect. It's hard to "don't be evil" when you have a subsidiary building what people were describing (hyperbolically) as some kind of precursor to the Terminator. If they put some big anime eyes and a cute tail on the new one, rather than an empty face place, it'd probably go down just fine.
Edit: Boston Dynamics also didn't help themselves with the "dog kicking" video. It (sort of) looks like a dog, and people were kicking it (well, not really, they were pushing it with their feet to show it good it was at balance). Obviously it's just a machine, but a lot of people saw some dudes kicking a dog.
- Aron 9y agoMy memory of this was that Google PR thought that humanoid robots might end up leading to associations with automation and job destruction. Also, it was never clear to me how much influence the PR position had vs. other reasons.
- molmalo 9y agoThere was also a big internal fight because Google thought the future robots should use wheels, but the engineers at Boston dynamics wanted to keep betting on legs. An hybrid was made that was awesome [1], but I think that in the end, both companies had a different vision for what they wanted to build. [1]