7 ms·

There's nothing scary about these robots, any more than my Roomba is scary. They are tools, and like all tools, they can be used for nefarious purposes or for t

There's nothing scary about these robots, any more than my Roomba is scary. They are tools, and like all tools, they can be used for nefarious purposes or for the benefit of mankind.

Shared404 6y ago
> 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.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  A Spot costs about $75,000, so as far as trusting the organizations... I mean, I find myself seriously considering buying one. Yes, I would likely have to add-on other modules over the course of time, but $75,000 for Spot's capabilities is actually pretty reasonable.
  - Rebelgecko 6y ago
    What would you use use it for if you had one?
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      Goofing off, most likely. I haven't really thought of a use case for the home, although there's literally dozens of them. I actually wonder if it could function as an auto-dog walker for my organic dog on the days when I'm too swamped with work to do so. The thought of attaching a leash to my dog and the leash to Spot while I'm indisposed is actually kind of attractive. I would have to make sure my dog has already done her business though, since I wouldn't want to be the kind of asshole that not only uses a robot to walk his dog, but also lets his dog shit on his neighbor's yard while a robot walks his dog.
      - iancmceachern 6y ago
        I wonder, would the time spent programming and integrating all this be less than just walking the dog? For me, this would defeat the purpose of having my dogs my our life. Having worked in robotics quit a bit this is a common trap. There are plenty of things that we can think of for a robot to do, but most of them would require more concessions, programming and maintenance time than it takes to just do the task, or hire folks to do it. The areas where the value prop holds up it really works well, but these kind of low value, high complexity applications like walking a dog around the neighborhood without dragging it by it's collar if the dogs knee hurts and it walks slow that day. A $75k robot arm with legs is not a completed application. We can already buy robots with the needed mobility to do things like walk dogs for far less. This is a classic hammer nail situation. I think this is the issue that BD keeps running into, they have an amazing team, amazing tech, amazing capabilities, but are still searching for that killer high value application. There are over 400k industrial robots sold every year, its a huge market. They sell well because it relatively straightforward to program and integrate them into workcells and factory lines to create value. To program and integrate one of these robots to do something so complex that it would necessitate a BD robot and not a standard industrial robot would be a huge development effort. It just doesn't hold up when we have folks that need work. The cost of one 75k robot plus two person years of engineering labor is 4 or 5 years worth of traditional labor. The value prop just isn't there until our ability to control, program and integrate these complex robots (cobot stuff) gets better.
        ralfd 6y ago
        https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot They promise "repeatable autonomous missions to gather consistent data", so my guess is programming a route and mapping terrain is reasonably easy. There is also remote control and camera access, if that could be triggered to automatically notify you (or a dog walking central command service supervising), for example when your dog is barking/complaining or resists to being dragged, it could go a long way to solve dog walking (for smaller dogs).
        iancmceachern 6y ago
  - Shared404 6y ago
    $75,000 is far enough out of reach of the average person that I think I'm standing by my statement.
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  For the price of one of those robots you can hire a minivan full of armed goons that will do exactly as you tell them todo with less supervision.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    During development, and initial per-unit sales? Sure. Once mass produced, not even close. Think of: - training costs (training grunts isn't 100% free) - pay as soldiers wait to go on missions - and here's the BIG one, medical care - and lastly? PR! PR, no more "soldiers coming home in body bags". Why, you can fight any war you want, and no one will get upset about your soldiers dying. Yet beyond that? How do you negotiate with one of these things? How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      > How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up? Right now? Regardless of if it’s controlled by remote or by AI, the sensors are probably easier to fool than an in-situ human would be.
      - bbarnett 6y ago
        I'm not talking about fooling. Mass produced, these things would be 10k max. We're talking 10+, 15+ years out. What sort of fear do robot soldiers have? None. How does it make people "upset", if a robot soldier is blown up. Now think on the converse. Right now, suicide bombers take out soldiers, but almost always take out innocents around those soldiers. Often, children are killed. Now, imagine the locals knowing that absolutely no enemy will be killed, just a machine, but dozens or more of their friends, family may be killed. How long will suicide bombing last, when the only human casualties are the local population?
        ben_w 6y ago
        Ok, but that’s a surprising direction to go in. Sure, this would make it less likely to use suicide bombs against soldiers — perhaps even politicians will put skin suits on the robots and use them for public appearances a-la Westworld for similar reasons — but grenades and RPGs and anti-material rifles and IEDs would likely all still be used. And £10k robots can also be used by terrorists, perhaps stolen from warehouses, perhaps hacked. That said, what worries me about terrorism is not cargo-culting shapes that look dangerous (be that robots which look like the Terminator or 3D printed guns), it’s people with imagination who know there are at least two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only the stuff in a normal domestic kitchen and methods taught in GCSE chemistry.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  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 human. There is already Neuralink and other hybird tech going on. I believe humans will willingly give up physical bodies in the long term (millenia scale). This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, ofcourse in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace.
  - bbarnett 6y ago
    This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, of course in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace. There will never be world peace, unless humanity is no longer human, or alternately, under the boot of an all encompassing empire ruled by force. To believe otherwise, is to believe history teaches us nothing, nor our knowledge of human behaviour. To assume that we somehow have a culture which "can do this", that our modern beliefs are "enlightened" enough to allow this, is the ultimate in hubris. Sure... humanity couldn't do it before, but now? Now, we're just ever so enlightened and perfect enough to enable world peace. There are only two real ways to enable world peace. 1) Genetically engineer the entire species to become more... social. Kill or prevent any 'old style' human reproducing. End the old species. There are innumerable issues here, including "we're just messing around with what we barely comprehend". Yet our entire culture is predicated upon how the human brain works, and the human brain works more on genetics, than post-birth learning. OR 2) Take over the entire planet, killing everyone who disagrees with you, and ensuring that due to the technology involved there can NEVER be a revolution. Further, destroy and hunt down every single person which does not swear fealty ; allow no external empires to form. Ever. NOTE: I am not happy about this, yet, this is reality. Let me put this another way. You want world peace? OK! Great! First, you'll need to end all murders, thefts, all anti-social behaviour. "World peace" is denied because of the genetics that create this behaviour. They're the same problem.
uniqueid 6y ago
They are scarier than your Roomba.
greatgirl 6y ago
A roomba doesn't have the potential to kill you.
- notum 6y ago
  Mount a knife on it. Though to day, the most dangerous murderous machines we have created have been cars.
  - caturopath 6y ago
    Done. What's next?
    - fsflover 6y ago
      Now wait until you fall on it.
  - slavik81 6y ago
    Your wish is my command. https://youtu.be/OwtxWL0P9wA https://youtu.be/OwtxWL0P9wA
- fsflover 6y ago
  It has a potential to sell info about you though.
blackrock 6y ago
This robot is Version 1.0. And yes, it’s just a puppet. For now. A human controls its movements. What’s missing is a brain. And that will come in Version 4.0. Or whenever they perfect a decision and control system, for fully autonomous decision making. That’s when you should worry. Or rather. You’re probably safe, if you live in one of the western allied nations. That is your privilege. But a black, brown, red, or yellow person in the 3rd world should worry. Because they will be the target of America’s oppression, via this robot. Meaning that: your 3rd world country had better accept democracy and western media, and have your leaders approved by Washington DC, otherwise we will deliver some freedom to you. I hope you enjoy the fresh smell of napalm in the morning. You get bonus points if your country has oil.
- rtx 6y ago
  We already have scarier robots, they are called self guided missiles. You don't have to imagine this new world.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  It is crazy to see from the outside how the color-of-skin obsession permeates every single conversation right now. I hope that the USA will be able to find some other topics and arguments one day. It is also false in this context. One of the most massive bombing campaigns in recent history was in European Serbia, and the hotspots of today (Syria, Iran) have a population that looks like Greeks. As for black: the only predominantly white country that systematically sticks its fingers into Subsaharan Africa is France. The only external power that grows its presence in the Third World overall is China and given how they treat their own population, I would not be surprised if the next wave of pseudocolonial wars was Beijing's.
  - AussieWog93 6y ago
    If you're going back to the 80's, don't forget South Africa's campaigns in Angola.
- throwaway342422 6y ago
  > your 3rd world country had better accept democracy ... approved by Washington DC ...or accept replacing a democracy with an us-friendly "anticommunist" dictatorship.
richardw 6y ago
If your Roomba was programmed to hurt me I’d surround myself with power cords. This looks like us so it’s easier to see how we’re threatened by it. It’s more visceral. My cats don’t care about my vacuum but if it walked and jumped their neutrons might fire differently.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  I can't edit my original comment, or else I'd add this line: Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano No one is going to send a fleet of these ultra-expensive Robo-Killers to assassinate you and everyone else on the battlefield. Once these micro-drones can be mass produced cheaply enough, and you can put enough high-explosive on them to fly up to a person's neck and !!pop!! someone's head clean off, you'll see them programmed with swarm behavior and be unleashed onto the battlefield. They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. More than enough capability to swarm entire battalions and wipe them out.
  - 0x0203 6y ago
    > Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano >They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. And can be trivially defeated by some netting, blinded by bright lights/lasers, and/or knocked out of the sky by leaf blowers and umbrellas. Despite what certain propagandaesque sci-fi "warning" videos would have people believe, I'm least worried about these nano-drones. At the end of the day bullets are still cheaper, less complicated, and more effective. And as soon as you give the drones some standoff capabilities to mitigate some of the countermeasures, you start loosing many of the perceived "benefits" and are back to just using guys with guns.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      I agree, that single nano-drone isn't scary. What of a swarm of hundreds?
amelius 6y ago
> There's nothing scary about these robots How would you feel if the dance contained some choreographed "mow the people down" moves?
- paganel 6y ago
  There isn't even a need for that, take the "classic" goose dance, for example, it can be particularly funny, like in this video [1], or out-right scary, like in this footage [2]. It all depends on the context, I can't see John Cleese turning into a genocidal dictator anytime soon, while we all know what the people in the second video did only a few years after those images were filmed. For what it's worth I see the robot in this story closer to the second video than to Cleese's comedic genius. [1] https://youtu.be/yfl6Lu3xQW0?t=82 https://youtu.be/yfl6Lu3xQW0?t=82 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSvS4LY26Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSvS4LY26Yg
ralfd 6y ago
They are more scary the same way a tiger is more scary than a cat even though both are Felidae.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cutitout 6y ago
> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know. > But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live. > If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Still, it's a nice way to shift blame to scientists and engineers, away from people who actually use these tools for evil, or commission development of technologies to use in their evil business models.
  - cutitout 6y ago
    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.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      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 someone died because of it. You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers. 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.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
If your Roomba was designed by a weapon manufacturer to gain your trust you should be concerned. If it had the ability to upload detailed maps of buildings you should be more concerned. If it was designed as an initial stepping stone to develop into a smart and versatile killer robot...

There's nothing scary about these robots, any more than my Roomba is scary. They are tools, and like all tools, they can be used for nefarious purposes or for the benefit of mankind.

Shared404 6y ago

> 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.

cbozeman 6y ago
A Spot costs about $75,000, so as far as trusting the organizations... I mean, I find myself seriously considering buying one. Yes, I would likely have to add-on other modules over the course of time, but $75,000 for Spot's capabilities is actually pretty reasonable.
- Rebelgecko 6y ago
  What would you use use it for if you had one?
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    Goofing off, most likely. I haven't really thought of a use case for the home, although there's literally dozens of them. I actually wonder if it could function as an auto-dog walker for my organic dog on the days when I'm too swamped with work to do so. The thought of attaching a leash to my dog and the leash to Spot while I'm indisposed is actually kind of attractive. I would have to make sure my dog has already done her business though, since I wouldn't want to be the kind of asshole that not only uses a robot to walk his dog, but also lets his dog shit on his neighbor's yard while a robot walks his dog.
    - iancmceachern 6y ago
      I wonder, would the time spent programming and integrating all this be less than just walking the dog? For me, this would defeat the purpose of having my dogs my our life. Having worked in robotics quit a bit this is a common trap. There are plenty of things that we can think of for a robot to do, but most of them would require more concessions, programming and maintenance time than it takes to just do the task, or hire folks to do it. The areas where the value prop holds up it really works well, but these kind of low value, high complexity applications like walking a dog around the neighborhood without dragging it by it's collar if the dogs knee hurts and it walks slow that day. A $75k robot arm with legs is not a completed application. We can already buy robots with the needed mobility to do things like walk dogs for far less. This is a classic hammer nail situation. I think this is the issue that BD keeps running into, they have an amazing team, amazing tech, amazing capabilities, but are still searching for that killer high value application. There are over 400k industrial robots sold every year, its a huge market. They sell well because it relatively straightforward to program and integrate them into workcells and factory lines to create value. To program and integrate one of these robots to do something so complex that it would necessitate a BD robot and not a standard industrial robot would be a huge development effort. It just doesn't hold up when we have folks that need work. The cost of one 75k robot plus two person years of engineering labor is 4 or 5 years worth of traditional labor. The value prop just isn't there until our ability to control, program and integrate these complex robots (cobot stuff) gets better.
      - ralfd 6y ago
        https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot https://www.bostondynamics.com/spot They promise "repeatable autonomous missions to gather consistent data", so my guess is programming a route and mapping terrain is reasonably easy. There is also remote control and camera access, if that could be triggered to automatically notify you (or a dog walking central command service supervising), for example when your dog is barking/complaining or resists to being dragged, it could go a long way to solve dog walking (for smaller dogs).
        iancmceachern 6y ago
- Shared404 6y ago
  $75,000 is far enough out of reach of the average person that I think I'm standing by my statement.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
For the price of one of those robots you can hire a minivan full of armed goons that will do exactly as you tell them todo with less supervision.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  During development, and initial per-unit sales? Sure. Once mass produced, not even close. Think of: - training costs (training grunts isn't 100% free) - pay as soldiers wait to go on missions - and here's the BIG one, medical care - and lastly? PR! PR, no more "soldiers coming home in body bags". Why, you can fight any war you want, and no one will get upset about your soldiers dying. Yet beyond that? How do you negotiate with one of these things? How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up?
  - ben_w 6y ago
    > How do you trick them, by walking an "innocent" up to them, and blowing them up? Right now? Regardless of if it’s controlled by remote or by AI, the sensors are probably easier to fool than an in-situ human would be.
    - bbarnett 6y ago
      I'm not talking about fooling. Mass produced, these things would be 10k max. We're talking 10+, 15+ years out. What sort of fear do robot soldiers have? None. How does it make people "upset", if a robot soldier is blown up. Now think on the converse. Right now, suicide bombers take out soldiers, but almost always take out innocents around those soldiers. Often, children are killed. Now, imagine the locals knowing that absolutely no enemy will be killed, just a machine, but dozens or more of their friends, family may be killed. How long will suicide bombing last, when the only human casualties are the local population?
      - ben_w 6y ago
        Ok, but that’s a surprising direction to go in. Sure, this would make it less likely to use suicide bombs against soldiers — perhaps even politicians will put skin suits on the robots and use them for public appearances a-la Westworld for similar reasons — but grenades and RPGs and anti-material rifles and IEDs would likely all still be used. And £10k robots can also be used by terrorists, perhaps stolen from warehouses, perhaps hacked. That said, what worries me about terrorism is not cargo-culting shapes that look dangerous (be that robots which look like the Terminator or 3D printed guns), it’s people with imagination who know there are at least two distinct ways to make a chemical weapon using only the stuff in a normal domestic kitchen and methods taught in GCSE chemistry.
systemvoltage 6y ago
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 human. There is already Neuralink and other hybird tech going on. I believe humans will willingly give up physical bodies in the long term (millenia scale). This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, ofcourse in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace.
- bbarnett 6y ago
  This is bound to happen. There is no way it wouldn't I believe, of course in short term, we gotta worry about stuff like politics, solving hunger and world peace. There will never be world peace, unless humanity is no longer human, or alternately, under the boot of an all encompassing empire ruled by force. To believe otherwise, is to believe history teaches us nothing, nor our knowledge of human behaviour. To assume that we somehow have a culture which "can do this", that our modern beliefs are "enlightened" enough to allow this, is the ultimate in hubris. Sure... humanity couldn't do it before, but now? Now, we're just ever so enlightened and perfect enough to enable world peace. There are only two real ways to enable world peace. 1) Genetically engineer the entire species to become more... social. Kill or prevent any 'old style' human reproducing. End the old species. There are innumerable issues here, including "we're just messing around with what we barely comprehend". Yet our entire culture is predicated upon how the human brain works, and the human brain works more on genetics, than post-birth learning. OR 2) Take over the entire planet, killing everyone who disagrees with you, and ensuring that due to the technology involved there can NEVER be a revolution. Further, destroy and hunt down every single person which does not swear fealty ; allow no external empires to form. Ever. NOTE: I am not happy about this, yet, this is reality. Let me put this another way. You want world peace? OK! Great! First, you'll need to end all murders, thefts, all anti-social behaviour. "World peace" is denied because of the genetics that create this behaviour. They're the same problem.

uniqueid 6y ago

They are scarier than your Roomba.

greatgirl 6y ago

A roomba doesn't have the potential to kill you.

notum 6y ago
Mount a knife on it. Though to day, the most dangerous murderous machines we have created have been cars.
- caturopath 6y ago
  Done. What's next?
  - fsflover 6y ago
    Now wait until you fall on it.
- slavik81 6y ago
  Your wish is my command. https://youtu.be/OwtxWL0P9wA https://youtu.be/OwtxWL0P9wA
fsflover 6y ago
It has a potential to sell info about you though.

blackrock 6y ago

This robot is Version 1.0. And yes, it’s just a puppet. For now. A human controls its movements. What’s missing is a brain. And that will come in Version 4.0. Or whenever they perfect a decision and control system, for fully autonomous decision making. That’s when you should worry. Or rather. You’re probably safe, if you live in one of the western allied nations. That is your privilege. But a black, brown, red, or yellow person in the 3rd world should worry. Because they will be the target of America’s oppression, via this robot. Meaning that: your 3rd world country had better accept democracy and western media, and have your leaders approved by Washington DC, otherwise we will deliver some freedom to you. I hope you enjoy the fresh smell of napalm in the morning. You get bonus points if your country has oil.

rtx 6y ago
We already have scarier robots, they are called self guided missiles. You don't have to imagine this new world.
inglor_cz 6y ago
It is crazy to see from the outside how the color-of-skin obsession permeates every single conversation right now. I hope that the USA will be able to find some other topics and arguments one day. It is also false in this context. One of the most massive bombing campaigns in recent history was in European Serbia, and the hotspots of today (Syria, Iran) have a population that looks like Greeks. As for black: the only predominantly white country that systematically sticks its fingers into Subsaharan Africa is France. The only external power that grows its presence in the Third World overall is China and given how they treat their own population, I would not be surprised if the next wave of pseudocolonial wars was Beijing's.
- AussieWog93 6y ago
  If you're going back to the 80's, don't forget South Africa's campaigns in Angola.
throwaway342422 6y ago
> your 3rd world country had better accept democracy ... approved by Washington DC ...or accept replacing a democracy with an us-friendly "anticommunist" dictatorship.

richardw 6y ago

If your Roomba was programmed to hurt me I’d surround myself with power cords. This looks like us so it’s easier to see how we’re threatened by it. It’s more visceral. My cats don’t care about my vacuum but if it walked and jumped their neutrons might fire differently.

cbozeman 6y ago
I can't edit my original comment, or else I'd add this line: Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hornet_Nano No one is going to send a fleet of these ultra-expensive Robo-Killers to assassinate you and everyone else on the battlefield. Once these micro-drones can be mass produced cheaply enough, and you can put enough high-explosive on them to fly up to a person's neck and !!pop!! someone's head clean off, you'll see them programmed with swarm behavior and be unleashed onto the battlefield. They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. More than enough capability to swarm entire battalions and wipe them out.
- 0x0203 6y ago
  > Everyone afraid of this, you ought to be afraid of micro-drones like the Black Hornet Nano >They fly faster than you can run (13 miles per hour), have a 1 mile range, and a 25 minute flight time. And can be trivially defeated by some netting, blinded by bright lights/lasers, and/or knocked out of the sky by leaf blowers and umbrellas. Despite what certain propagandaesque sci-fi "warning" videos would have people believe, I'm least worried about these nano-drones. At the end of the day bullets are still cheaper, less complicated, and more effective. And as soon as you give the drones some standoff capabilities to mitigate some of the countermeasures, you start loosing many of the perceived "benefits" and are back to just using guys with guns.
  - klyrs 6y ago
    I agree, that single nano-drone isn't scary. What of a swarm of hundreds?

amelius 6y ago

> There's nothing scary about these robots How would you feel if the dance contained some choreographed "mow the people down" moves?

paganel 6y ago
There isn't even a need for that, take the "classic" goose dance, for example, it can be particularly funny, like in this video [1], or out-right scary, like in this footage [2]. It all depends on the context, I can't see John Cleese turning into a genocidal dictator anytime soon, while we all know what the people in the second video did only a few years after those images were filmed. For what it's worth I see the robot in this story closer to the second video than to Cleese's comedic genius. [1] https://youtu.be/yfl6Lu3xQW0?t=82 https://youtu.be/yfl6Lu3xQW0?t=82 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSvS4LY26Yg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSvS4LY26Yg

ralfd 6y ago

They are more scary the same way a tiger is more scary than a cat even though both are Felidae.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cutitout 6y ago

> It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know. > But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live. > If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used. -- Joseph Weizenbaum, http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html http://tech.mit.edu/V105/N16/weisen.16n.html

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Still, it's a nice way to shift blame to scientists and engineers, away from people who actually use these tools for evil, or commission development of technologies to use in their evil business models.
- cutitout 6y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    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 someone died because of it. You definitely want to focus your attention on people with most agency over the problem, and those people usually aren't scientists or engineers. 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.

eeZah7Ux 6y ago

If your Roomba was designed by a weapon manufacturer to gain your trust you should be concerned. If it had the ability to upload detailed maps of buildings you should be more concerned. If it was designed as an initial stepping stone to develop into a smart and versatile killer robot...