12 ms·

I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again." In between the advances in "holograph

by bozzcl 6y ago

I love how there were people in the upper floor just walking by without even looking. "Oh, the robots are dancing again." In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately. Many of my relatives and friends in my home country haven't even heard about any of these. They're not mentioned in the news or magazines whatsoever. Granted, they probably don't have any use for this information for their daily lives... but I do believe learning about this keeps alive my sense of childlike wonder, and it's sad to know others are missing out.

joe_the_user 6y ago
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 Boston Dynamics takes over paths and shows robots dancing with each other is their robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. Unstructured, "soft" interaction seem pretty easy to us but might actually close to "AI complete" in their potential complexity. In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. I think your list illustrates how there's a wide variation among technologies in the time from demonstration to implementation. I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s. Hobby drones are just now becoming useful, forty years later. Jet packs have been around for a long time but you still can't use them without serious safety precautions and they still aren't a way people would commute.
- serf 6y ago
  >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 robot while maintaining whatever timing is called out for the choreography work; and the person-hours that such work must have consumed.
  - chris_wot 6y ago
    It's amazing to me they see a puppet. Do they call a car a puppet? It's controlled by a human. The robot spot is hardly what I'd call a puppet, for instance.
- tachyonbeam 6y ago
  It could also just be that it took 100 takes to shoot this little video. You might stop to watch the first 10 times, but the third day, it's become routine.
- gfodor 6y ago
  A perfect puppet is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating the magical robots we were promised as kids. So it's progress.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  > you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it. Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI Doing it without a tether for a reasonable timeframe (30+ minutes) is insane! Disney animatronics don't even come close to the complexity of these robots (even though what Disney has done is for sure impressive). > robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. This style of robot has definitely hit a threshold of price and usefulness, not unlike what happened for drones just ten years ago. I could be wrong, but I hope I'm not! It really feels like things are moving at a crazy speed in the robotics field right now.
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    >> robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. > I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. Oh, I'd love to see that change. That would be a change in reality, not perception. It wouldn't force me to change my belief that as things stand now, walking have been an ongoing failure and disappointment.. See: Edit: Also, I should admit I'm discounting the serious engineering challenge of just getting robots to walk on uneven ground by itself. Doing seeming simple stuff like has where the progress of idk 30 years has appeared. But anything more than those ultra-simple things really wasn't happened. I'd still stick with 90% of impressive is puppeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge
    - plutonorm 6y ago
      Most people think like you do. But then again most people are blindsided by revolutionary change.
  - 6y ago
- rkagerer 6y ago
  I got a dog a year ago and one of the things I'm most impressed with is how well he understands context and adapts to new situations. Granted, the first time I took him to a rocky riverside all four paws fell into cracks between the boulders like some early Boston Dynamics prototype (he's from Texas and I guess never encountered terrain like that before) but he's a pro now. And he's mastered "soft human interaction" right out of the box (is just amazing with toddlers). Seeing all this firsthand makes me appreciate how fine-tuned the product of evolution is and how much work must go into achieving basic behaviors we take for granted.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I adopted a then-8-week-old kitten less than two months ago, and it's been an eye-opening delight watching him adapt just to things in my home. During his first week he managed to hop onto a window sill, and then fell off when he tried to turn around to walk along it the other way. Less than a couple weeks later he was effortlessly walking along the edge of a pillow stood on its side, a much narrower, unstable surface. It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt.
    - drzaiusapelord 6y ago
      It is! Of course we animals are standing on the shoulders of hundreds of millions of years of evolution's fine-tuning. But to see it in action like this is incredible. Or a child from ages 2 or 3 to ages 4 or 5, is night a day. At 2 or 3, they're drowning risks in the tub. At 4 or 5 they're playing mario kart with you.
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      > It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt. I work at a raptor conservancy. The young birds can fly as soon as their wings/muscles are suitably developed, but learning to master the air takes a lot longer. E.g. they initially fail downwind landings on a gusty day.
- drzaiusapelord 6y ago
  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 these in our homes. We have the bodies, sorta, but we just don't have the brains. Dancing just isn't impressive and like you say, seems a lot like a higher tech version of Disneyworld. What I want to see is one of these, on its own accord, run into a burning building and save a child. Choreography just isn't impressive outside of the 'wow' factor. Without advanced AI brains, these bodies are almost useless shells and I imagine Google getting out of this space may have had something to do with that.
  - bonoboTP 6y ago
    Exactly. Popular perception after seeing a video like this is to project capabilities into the robot that just aren't there. Talk to the lay public, people! People assume this is actual AI, that it could just walk into an unknown new kitchen and do useful tasks like get dirty dishes in the dishwasher or other general stuff. The other thing is a conflation of this kind of robotics with deep learning. Most of the work by Boston Dynamics uses no fancy machine learning. It is "just" (for experts it's not a "just", but a "just" for the public) electrical and mechanical and control engineering plus lots of specifically programmed behavior. Now, it is impressive sure, but the humanoid form makes laypeople think there is more to it than there is.
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    Well, technically some AI programs are already pretty good at creating new songs and choreography. Google 'AI choreography' and 'AI songwriter'.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s. Tesla did this in 1898. https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-control-boat.html https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-con...
- webmaven 6y ago
  > We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. With all due respect to Disney's Imagineers and their technical accomplishments, you can't really compare Disney animatronics that are literally bolted to the floor to what's being demonstrated here. You can compare the animatronic presidents etc. to various industrial robots that are also fixed in place if you like, but the closest Disney equivalent to Atlas etc. are the 'stuntronics' first demonstrated in 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/disney-imagineering-has-created-autonomous-robot-stunt-doubles/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/disney-imagineering-has-cr...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 6y ago
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.
- fermienrico 6y ago
  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 last few decades. And continue to do so. Yes, inequality has grown and accelerated due to the pandemic (Russell 2000 vs S&P500, retail is screwed but there is nothing we can do about it besides giving relief). We need to fix tax laws and corporate loop holes, not instituting marxism in our society.
  - jazzabeanie 6y ago
    There will be no early vaccine shop, but for sure one can get a vaccine early with the right connections.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    WW2 was bigger. The lack of mobilization is the hallmark of this crisis. The vaccines are the only bright point in sight.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later, hoping the vaccines will save us, and everyone is still out horsing around, spreading the disease everywhere.
la6471 6y ago
Did you read the comments on the YouTube video itself? Outside this techie HN bubble the real world people think of these robots dancing on their jobs anr lifeless bodies. Forget your home countries , but this is how most people in USA thinks about the technological progress as well. And on top of that I am wondering when AI will be parsing these YouTube comments in another 10 years it will just interpret the massive hate that the YouTube comments show for robots and AI and don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense. It sounds like a absurd joke I know but for some reason it seems to me one of the many possibilities.
- st1x7 6y ago
  > don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense. It sounds like a absurd joke I know but for some reason it seems to me one of the many possibilities. It sounds like science fiction. It's hard to emphasize enough how far the current state of AI is from what you're describing. I would be surprised if in 10 years we have a remote idea of how to build what you're describing, let alone have it actually exist and run.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - colordrops 6y ago
    What about 30 years? 50? 100? Is that too far out to worry about?
    - Ajedi32 6y ago
      In my view the biggest issue with the whole "robots unite to violently overthrow humanity" trope isn't its technological infeasibility (though it _is_ technologically infeasible for the forseeable future), but rather the fact that it presupposes an AI that is essentially human; with all the same emotions, goals, and vices that a human would have. There's no reason to think a hypothetical future AGI would care in the slightest about its own survival, let alone be both egotistical and spiteful enough to hunt people down based on idle comments they made on YouTube decades ago. There are so many unfounded assumptions about the way AGI would work inherent in such a hypothetical scenario that it's hard to take seriously as anything other than a sci-fi plot device.
plutonorm 6y ago
My cofounders are oblivious.
dmkolobov 6y ago
I used to read pop-sci mags and get excited about the latest advancements in X, but nowadays I feel one of two things about X: 1. Neither I, nor my friends will ever be able to afford X 2. X is going to make my life worse Usually I feel both.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  Plus "X is never quite what it seems"
  - ampdepolymerase 6y ago
    X comes with subscription, microtransactions, ads, wants your personal data, and/or is the result of regulatory capture.
    - throwaway1500 6y ago
      X comes with its own blockchain.
    - m463 6y ago
      the troubling part: not at first. Then when something is "normal" stuff is "added" and when people complain they are ridiculed by others who don't realize or don't care. I think we should normalize a little common sense. You know, the golden rule. If you would not snoop on other people, why should other people snoop on you (phone app, iot, car, whatever)
- dsabanin 6y ago
  I’m sure at some point people said similar things about stuff like hot shower and telephone.
  - Zanni 6y ago
    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?
atulatul 6y ago
>me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/
darepublic 6y ago
what if the boston dynamic robots are taught how to assemble themselves.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Then we control the input components. Robot uprising won't be an issue until the robots learn to operate and maintain the entire supply chain that goes into making them.
- adrianN 6y ago
  We have had all of history to learn how to control intelligent serfs who know how to assemble copies of themselves. I'm sure many lessons will transfer to robots.
purplecats 6y ago
> It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously scary technical advancements going on lately.
traveler01 6y ago
I mean, you know you're in the future when you see someone with cochlear implants. My gf has that and she can listen to music in her brain.
ayy_lmao 6y ago
Any cool cybernetic prosthesis you were thinking about when writing your comment?

by bozzcl 6y ago

joe_the_user 6y ago

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 Boston Dynamics takes over paths and shows robots dancing with each other is their robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. Unstructured, "soft" interaction seem pretty easy to us but might actually close to "AI complete" in their potential complexity. In between the advances in "holographic" displays (not quite as sci-fi as we would want, but they are progressing), commercial space flight, cybernetic prosthetics, CRISPR and this... we are living in the future. It's amazing. I think your list illustrates how there's a wide variation among technologies in the time from demonstration to implementation. I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s. Hobby drones are just now becoming useful, forty years later. Jet packs have been around for a long time but you still can't use them without serious safety precautions and they still aren't a way people would commute.

serf 6y ago
>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 robot while maintaining whatever timing is called out for the choreography work; and the person-hours that such work must have consumed.
- chris_wot 6y ago
  It's amazing to me they see a puppet. Do they call a car a puppet? It's controlled by a human. The robot spot is hardly what I'd call a puppet, for instance.
tachyonbeam 6y ago
It could also just be that it took 100 takes to shoot this little video. You might stop to watch the first 10 times, but the third day, it's become routine.
gfodor 6y ago
A perfect puppet is a necessary but insufficient condition for creating the magical robots we were promised as kids. So it's progress.
reportingsjr 6y ago
> you can realize they're just large puppets. We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. This is hugely understating just how difficult it is for a biped/quadruped robot to move around in the world without continuously falling, getting stuck, etc. Like seriously, seriously underestimates it. Watch this video to see spot walk over some terrain that even people struggle with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7s1sr4JdlI Doing it without a tether for a reasonable timeframe (30+ minutes) is insane! Disney animatronics don't even come close to the complexity of these robots (even though what Disney has done is for sure impressive). > robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. This style of robot has definitely hit a threshold of price and usefulness, not unlike what happened for drones just ten years ago. I could be wrong, but I hope I'm not! It really feels like things are moving at a crazy speed in the robotics field right now.
- joe_the_user 6y ago
  >> robots still generally can't interact with humans or the environment in an unstructured way. > I think this is pretty short sighted, and you're going to have your mind changed quite rapidly in the next couple of years. Oh, I'd love to see that change. That would be a change in reality, not perception. It wouldn't force me to change my belief that as things stand now, walking have been an ongoing failure and disappointment.. See: Edit: Also, I should admit I'm discounting the serious engineering challenge of just getting robots to walk on uneven ground by itself. Doing seeming simple stuff like has where the progress of idk 30 years has appeared. But anything more than those ultra-simple things really wasn't happened. I'd still stick with 90% of impressive is puppeting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Robotics_Challenge
  - plutonorm 6y ago
    Most people think like you do. But then again most people are blindsided by revolutionary change.
- 6y ago
rkagerer 6y ago
I got a dog a year ago and one of the things I'm most impressed with is how well he understands context and adapts to new situations. Granted, the first time I took him to a rocky riverside all four paws fell into cracks between the boulders like some early Boston Dynamics prototype (he's from Texas and I guess never encountered terrain like that before) but he's a pro now. And he's mastered "soft human interaction" right out of the box (is just amazing with toddlers). Seeing all this firsthand makes me appreciate how fine-tuned the product of evolution is and how much work must go into achieving basic behaviors we take for granted.
- kelnos 6y ago
  I adopted a then-8-week-old kitten less than two months ago, and it's been an eye-opening delight watching him adapt just to things in my home. During his first week he managed to hop onto a window sill, and then fell off when he tried to turn around to walk along it the other way. Less than a couple weeks later he was effortlessly walking along the edge of a pillow stood on its side, a much narrower, unstable surface. It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt.
  - drzaiusapelord 6y ago
    It is! Of course we animals are standing on the shoulders of hundreds of millions of years of evolution's fine-tuning. But to see it in action like this is incredible. Or a child from ages 2 or 3 to ages 4 or 5, is night a day. At 2 or 3, they're drowning risks in the tub. At 4 or 5 they're playing mario kart with you.
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > It's amazing to me that a tiny creature like that can learn to adapt in that way with so few days of life under his belt. I work at a raptor conservancy. The young birds can fly as soon as their wings/muscles are suitably developed, but learning to master the air takes a lot longer. E.g. they initially fail downwind landings on a gusty day.
drzaiusapelord 6y ago
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 these in our homes. We have the bodies, sorta, but we just don't have the brains. Dancing just isn't impressive and like you say, seems a lot like a higher tech version of Disneyworld. What I want to see is one of these, on its own accord, run into a burning building and save a child. Choreography just isn't impressive outside of the 'wow' factor. Without advanced AI brains, these bodies are almost useless shells and I imagine Google getting out of this space may have had something to do with that.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  Exactly. Popular perception after seeing a video like this is to project capabilities into the robot that just aren't there. Talk to the lay public, people! People assume this is actual AI, that it could just walk into an unknown new kitchen and do useful tasks like get dirty dishes in the dishwasher or other general stuff. The other thing is a conflation of this kind of robotics with deep learning. Most of the work by Boston Dynamics uses no fancy machine learning. It is "just" (for experts it's not a "just", but a "just" for the public) electrical and mechanical and control engineering plus lots of specifically programmed behavior. Now, it is impressive sure, but the humanoid form makes laypeople think there is more to it than there is.
- ilaksh 6y ago
  Well, technically some AI programs are already pretty good at creating new songs and choreography. Google 'AI choreography' and 'AI songwriter'.
Judgmentality 6y ago
> I watched radio controlled boats go around lakes in 1970s. Tesla did this in 1898. https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-control-boat.html https://www.engadget.com/2014-01-19-nikola-teslas-remote-con...
webmaven 6y ago
> We've had dancing puppets like Walt Disney's Small World. With all due respect to Disney's Imagineers and their technical accomplishments, you can't really compare Disney animatronics that are literally bolted to the floor to what's being demonstrated here. You can compare the animatronic presidents etc. to various industrial robots that are also fixed in place if you like, but the closest Disney equivalent to Atlas etc. are the 'stuntronics' first demonstrated in 2018: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/disney-imagineering-has-created-autonomous-robot-stunt-doubles/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/28/disney-imagineering-has-cr...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pjc50 6y ago

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.

fermienrico 6y ago
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 last few decades. And continue to do so. Yes, inequality has grown and accelerated due to the pandemic (Russell 2000 vs S&P500, retail is screwed but there is nothing we can do about it besides giving relief). We need to fix tax laws and corporate loop holes, not instituting marxism in our society.
- jazzabeanie 6y ago
  There will be no early vaccine shop, but for sure one can get a vaccine early with the right connections.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tehjoker 6y ago
  WW2 was bigger. The lack of mobilization is the hallmark of this crisis. The vaccines are the only bright point in sight.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    To me, the hallmark of this pandemic was people’s (and Americans’ in particular) unwillingness to act collectively and cooperatively for everyone’s benefit. It was a gigantic game of Prisoners Dilemma, where we could have won with everyone cooperating (masks and staying at home) but people instead chose to defect and go out protesting, refusing the masks, and buying khakis. Here we are a year later, hoping the vaccines will save us, and everyone is still out horsing around, spreading the disease everywhere.

la6471 6y ago

Did you read the comments on the YouTube video itself? Outside this techie HN bubble the real world people think of these robots dancing on their jobs anr lifeless bodies. Forget your home countries , but this is how most people in USA thinks about the technological progress as well. And on top of that I am wondering when AI will be parsing these YouTube comments in another 10 years it will just interpret the massive hate that the YouTube comments show for robots and AI and don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense. It sounds like a absurd joke I know but for some reason it seems to me one of the many possibilities.

st1x7 6y ago
> don’t be surprised if it sends some rouge instructions to these robots to annihilate human beings in self defense. It sounds like a absurd joke I know but for some reason it seems to me one of the many possibilities. It sounds like science fiction. It's hard to emphasize enough how far the current state of AI is from what you're describing. I would be surprised if in 10 years we have a remote idea of how to build what you're describing, let alone have it actually exist and run.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- colordrops 6y ago
  What about 30 years? 50? 100? Is that too far out to worry about?
  - Ajedi32 6y ago
    In my view the biggest issue with the whole "robots unite to violently overthrow humanity" trope isn't its technological infeasibility (though it _is_ technologically infeasible for the forseeable future), but rather the fact that it presupposes an AI that is essentially human; with all the same emotions, goals, and vices that a human would have. There's no reason to think a hypothetical future AGI would care in the slightest about its own survival, let alone be both egotistical and spiteful enough to hunt people down based on idle comments they made on YouTube decades ago. There are so many unfounded assumptions about the way AGI would work inherent in such a hypothetical scenario that it's hard to take seriously as anything other than a sci-fi plot device.

plutonorm 6y ago

My cofounders are oblivious.

dmkolobov 6y ago

I used to read pop-sci mags and get excited about the latest advancements in X, but nowadays I feel one of two things about X: 1. Neither I, nor my friends will ever be able to afford X 2. X is going to make my life worse Usually I feel both.

joe_the_user 6y ago
Plus "X is never quite what it seems"
- ampdepolymerase 6y ago
  X comes with subscription, microtransactions, ads, wants your personal data, and/or is the result of regulatory capture.
  - throwaway1500 6y ago
    X comes with its own blockchain.
  - m463 6y ago
    the troubling part: not at first. Then when something is "normal" stuff is "added" and when people complain they are ridiculed by others who don't realize or don't care. I think we should normalize a little common sense. You know, the golden rule. If you would not snoop on other people, why should other people snoop on you (phone app, iot, car, whatever)
dsabanin 6y ago
I’m sure at some point people said similar things about stuff like hot shower and telephone.
- Zanni 6y ago
  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?

atulatul 6y ago

>me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/

darepublic 6y ago

what if the boston dynamic robots are taught how to assemble themselves.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Then we control the input components. Robot uprising won't be an issue until the robots learn to operate and maintain the entire supply chain that goes into making them.
adrianN 6y ago
We have had all of history to learn how to control intelligent serfs who know how to assemble copies of themselves. I'm sure many lessons will transfer to robots.

purplecats 6y ago

> It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously cool technical advancements going on lately. It makes me a little sad more people are not aware of the ridiculously scary technical advancements going on lately.

traveler01 6y ago

I mean, you know you're in the future when you see someone with cochlear implants. My gf has that and she can listen to music in her brain.

ayy_lmao 6y ago

Any cool cybernetic prosthesis you were thinking about when writing your comment?