10 ms·

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'

• handrous 5y ago
  I think the developed world's headed nigh-inevitably toward something more closely resembling the Chinese model of government—maybe not with autocratic leadership, but with similar levels of centralized surveillance and such, extensive Internet filtering and blocking, and yeah, probably a lot more robots in law enforcement (military? Definitely yes in China if it makes cost/benefit sense, and maybe in the West whether it does or not—yes in either case for flying drones, that's already well underway) I think we'll find states that fail to do that, suffer. The other way out is rejection of technology to a large extent, but I doubt many will try that model as it'd cause a large & swift hit to quality of life. (why, yes, I do have a fairly large technological-determinism and social-groups-experience-evolution-like-anything-else-does streak, why do you ask?)
  • CryptoPunk 5y ago
    States that don't implement those forms of totalitarian surveillance/control will not suffer. They will be far more stable, with a less concentrated distribution of power and thus less economic resources wasted through rent-seeking. Centralization of power invites corruption and leads to social fragility.
• frozenport 5y ago
  firefighters, nurses, construction workers
  • mastax 5y ago
    When we automate the last jobs that can't be offshored we'll have to ask some questions as a society.
    • inglor_cz 5y ago
      From a nurse's point of view, having an intelligent helper like Atlas doing lifting of heavy patients etc. means saving her back from injury.
  • prepend 5y ago
    All these positions involve life and death decisions that freak me out. I want the source code to firefighting bots to be public so I know whether my town buys the ones that prioritize babies over elderly. Or stuff like it’s easier to save 5 dogs than 1 human. Nurses too have great power for good and harm. Currently when nurses decide on mercy killings [0] it requires lots of deliberation to figure out and it’s just one person. If a robonurse is programmed to put lethal morphine into a patient under certain conditions, that’s a big deal. [0] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12205440 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122054...
• alecst 5y ago
  Same. It's undeniably cool. But with developments like this, I just picture humanity slowly writing its own epitaph.
• kingsloi 5y ago
  I get some Black Mirror-esque vibes from this sort of tech, too. The 90s kid in me also gets MechWarrior vibes, too. Also, I looked a while ago but is there anything up and coming in the anti-facial recognition space? I know that some guy created an almost life-like replica of his own face for sale, and then there were some sort of reflectors, but anything that cannot be outlawed, like a full face covering, would be cool.
  • squarefoot 5y ago
    A couple years ago researchers found that certain patterns if superimposed to a person's video would confuse some face detection algorithm, but there were still caveats, and it was two years ago, which is a lot in this field. https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512472/fool-ai-surveillance-adversarial-example-yolov2-person-detection https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512472/fool-ai-surveill...
• tyingq 5y ago
  I would guess even the more mundane "bad robot" scenarios, like the various interactions with police bots in Elysium, might also play out.
• okokwhatever 5y ago
  Initial economic impact will be harder for those whose job is simply moving things/people around. And those people, obviously aren't aware of the problem they'll face in a few years (5-10?). Thats the real problem in the near horizon.
• mc32 5y ago
  If they were ever deployed as auxiliaries to law enforcement, my hope would be any weapon would have to have a human approve a request. Robots should be able to swarm and restrain uncooperative suspects so there should be less need for lethality unless the perpetrator is an active threat against other people -a hostage situation, mass shooting, etc.
  • toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Robots will be the new zip ties to restrain you while your rights are violated. It’s not a tech failure though, it’s a governance and accountability failure.
    • mc32 5y ago
      Do do we want more uniform enforcement via robot, or do we want more leeway for human LEOs? It used to be cops could make their own decisions on the spot about a subject (good or bad), now with cameras there is much much less ad-hoc decision making. Everyone gets booked. It’s a double edged sword. Depends on what we want.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • tehwebguy 5y ago
        Neither! Human LEOs in the US need to have fewer weapons and more accountability, they are currently virtually un-prosecutable. Even when cops commit a crime on camera it is extremely rare for them to be indicted.
      • sangnoir 5y ago
        > Do do we want more uniform enforcement via robot, or do we want more leeway for human LEOs? Or, do you want more enforcement, period. Automation can scale a lot more than human LEO - and since everyone breaks some law pretty much daily, that limitation is a feature in my book. Didn't turn on your blinkers for long enough before switching lanes on a deserted street (by 0.2 seconds)? Jailerbot 2000 deactivates your car, detains you and sends you to the fully automated jail below the city until the judge sees you on Monday.
• narrator 5y ago
  The military will just use aerial drone slaughterbots. The Azerbaijanis did this in the recent Armenia/Azerbaijan war and it was a total blowout against 20th century tech. Here's what I'm thinking the good future looks like: Let's say I have a big back yard and would like to have that be a productive farm. AI bot comes over, surveys the land, does soil tests, orders seeds, fertilizer and garden equipment off Amazon. Plants seeds, sets up permaculture, sets up irrigation, installs monitoring, goes next door, repeats for every house in the neighborhood. That's the kind of AI future I want to see. Software codifying knowledge of an experienced practitioner to manipulate the physical world in a way beneficial to humans.
  • handrous 5y ago
    > The military will just use arial drone slaughterbots. The Azerbaijanis did this in the recent Armenia/Azerbaijan war and it was a total blowout against 20th century tech. It hadn't occurred to me that drones let despots wage high-tempo modern wars (at least, partially) without the associated risks (of devolved control) and costs (of very expensive training and equipment for your soldiers)—but they totally do. That's a pretty big deal. Wonder if we'll see 2nd-tier, regional powers gain influence through this effect, as they can afford quite good drone programs while weaker neighbors might not be able to.
    • btbuildem 5y ago
      As with anything else, we will have countermeasures for drone warfare as well.
      • leshow 5y ago
        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.
        • shadowgovt 5y ago
          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-kill decisions --> jamming drone + scrambling IFF --> murder-bot turned on its 'owners.'"
• D13Fd 5y ago
  I think the key is recognizing that these have nothing to do with true AI or replacing humans in any profession. This is just a semi-autonomous vehicle that is bipedal or quadrupedal instead of having wheels. That's it.
• thatguy0900 5y ago
  I think the future headlines will be that widespread rebellions will be always put down because the army can't be convinced to switch sides. I think we're very close to a situation where current governments in power can only be deposed by external armies.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  I don’t know. That just sounds like pessimism about the direction of society, which means that any technology that can be used for a wide range of tasks can obviously be used for bad things. Slowing the progress of technology is not going to solve or even improve the outcomes if society is moving in a bad direction, unless you are somehow able to very precisely predict the outcomes of each specific technology and slow progress very selectively. And if you were able to do that, I don’t think technologies like this one would be a likely candidate for something that would disproportionately help the bad actors in society.
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  Boston Dynamics exec: "That's a sensing problem, we are a controls and dynamics company".
• lifty 5y ago
  If we retain the same semi-centralised power structures for governing society, then I think it's unavoidable that we will face the scenario you mention. We need to decentralise governance and power in a massive way if we are to avoid negative effects from these incredibly powerful technologies.
  • ghaff 5y ago
    If you look around the world (and across history), the natural outcome of weak central institutions is more along the lines of feudal warlords than something utopian.
    • lifty 5y ago
      You're right. So what we need is strong institutions which are controlled by decentralised power levers. What I have in mind is cryptographic based control combined with concepts from liquid democracy.
  • mrfusion 5y ago
    > We need to decentralise governance and power in a massive way Agreed but I’d also like to see human rights protected from the new decentralized governments. Not sure how that could work.
    • lifty 5y ago
      We could mandate that all AI robots should load an abide by a digital constitution that has been cryptographically signed by a majority of the population.
      • djrogers 5y ago
        And how do you enforce your mandate? Without the threat of physical violence, any mandate devolves into a suggestion - or worse, handcuffs on the just.
        • 5y ago
• nostrademons 5y ago
  Boston Dynamics was initially DARPA funded and intended for military uses, so you're not wrong. The weird thing is that the more I study history, the more I think that the real dystopia started a century (and perhaps a couple millenia) before I was born, and we're just so adapted to it that we think it's normal. Take the "[Ro]bot" out of your headlines and those would be headlines from today, and if you ignore that the media never bothered to report on those a century ago, they'd be headlines from a hundred years ago. We were depersonalized by the industrial revolution, and then large numbers of us were killed in the wars that followed. In some ways, this gives me a weird sort of hope that our descendants will welcome their robot overlords. In others, there's a melancholy foreboding that our descendants will welcome their robot overlords.
  • mrfusion 5y ago
    When and how did the real dystopia start?
    • claudiulodro 5y ago
      Some would argue that it started with agriculture: > According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence during the Neolithic Revolution gave rise to coercion, social alienation and social stratification. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-primitivism
      • imglorp 5y ago
        This sounds like it resonates with Ted Kaczynski's thesis.
        • Zababa 5y ago
          You can actually see in the linked article that it's the opposite. He is mostly against "global" technology (technology at a larger scale than what you can make in a village for example).
        • 5y ago
• BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  > I feel like "AI Robot cops show implicit bias resulting in 3 deaths" or "Robot Cop shoots innocent person after facial recognition goes bad" Maybe. But that's not different than human cops who already show implicit bias and poor facial recognition and kill people they have no right to kill.
• aggie 5y ago
  "AI Robot cops show implicit bias resulting in 3 deaths" is a headline today if you remove the AI robot part. As evidenced by the comments in this thread and any other on these robots, the public is extremely skeptical of them. If they do indeed exhibit these kinds of harms, the public will likely enact severe restrictions on them. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up in a situation where a lot of benefits are left on the table due to over-caution, just as you might see with self-driving cars that kill fewer people but are highlighted in the news when the rare accident does happen.
  • btbuildem 5y ago
    The robots will just become drones (remotely controlled by humans). BD demos are great to show that these will be autonomously ambulatory (you just tell them which direction to move, they manage the low-level concerns of the movement). We won't trust AI with decision-making, but we will trust the status-quo police forces to dish out violence from the safety of an office.
• jvanderbot 5y ago
  I'm not surprised people look at this human-like and try to attribute human-like responsibilities. It'll be a marketing trap that many fall into. But for now, the sensing, state estimation, and energy density problems preclude the use of these robots in the real world. There's far too much uncertainty in the structure of the world or the modelling of unknown areas to do parkour outside -- unless I've missed something huge that boston dynamics has done without talking about. As someone said below, however, if you can develop a hybrid control scheme with a human controlling a smart-ish legged vehicle, you're on a roll. That's the future for legged vehicles that I could see: something like mechwarrior or titanfall, but without the AI (remote operated). Or Dreadnaughts. But small (as someone else pointed out).
  • sandworm101 5y ago
    >> hybrid control scheme with a human controlling a smart-ish legged vehicle Much depends on scale. BD is working towards a robot-donkey, something that can follow soldiers over rough terrain. At scales much larger than a horse, such robots already exist and are already much more mobile than soldiers in most terrains. These robots are called tanks. Or trucks. Once a vehicle is carrying a large enough load that it will not fit between the trees and so cannot follow soldiers into forests, legs are not very useful. Wheels and tracks are better than legs, particularly in soft/wet terrain. So large walking robots are likely never going to happen. The MechWarrior fantasy will have to live on in things not much larger than a horse, things that can fit between trees and along footpaths.
    • jvanderbot 5y ago
      In hindsight of all of 5 minutes, I agree with you. But, I read somewhere that only 20% (ish) of the earth's surface is accessible by wheeled / tracked vehicles. I guess the important part is that's where the people are.
      • sandworm101 5y ago
        Well, 70% is oceans. So of the land 20% would be the majority of terrain. Also, hovercraft probably push that number even higher.
• vijucat 5y ago
  I'm reminded of the robot that goes wrong in Robocop. Except, with Reinforcement Learning, we'll have a robot that executes hundreds flawlessly until stopped. This is the kind of advancement that should be regulated, IMHO.
• mrfusion 5y ago
  Most bad stuff can more easily be done with drones. I wouldn’t worry about these guys. Just tie their legs together.
• Consultant32452 5y ago
  Whenever they do these demos they never show them firing weapons. I guess they just haven't figured that out yet.
  • meowster 5y ago
    Or they have, but just don't want to release the video and scare people.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Bundling BD's work with loss of privacy, face recog, etc. is so far fetched. This is just such an illinformed fearful stance that is cliche with any robotic innovation - it gets a disproportionate amount of pessimism (because robots!). Motorized controls of arms and limbs is physical intelligence, a very small slice of "AI" if you want to call that. "Overlords" meme has infested most of YT comments and but surprised to see it on HN. Disproportionate attention to physical visceral things - especially if it looks like humans - is particularly prone to fear response. Have you ever seen your cat/dog stare at a look-alike version of stuffed toy and become completely bamboozled? Humans are particularly magnetized by anything that has 2 legs and moves like itself. No one bats an eye on a sentry with a gatling gun, but how dare you put 2 legs under it - sudden dystopia.
• soperj 5y ago
  So basically the same headlines as right now, but with Robot in the title?
• IndySun 5y ago
  How do you prosecute a robot that kills the wrong person? It's not possible. Would you then logically move on to prosecute the software programmer? And for what crime? Is it murder? (side note : ios slide to type will not allow the spelling of murder, try it.)
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  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 both. Edit: I think from a seek and destroy perspective we are much more likely to go the cloud of small drones route than these. These would serve as an armed / peace keeping / law enforcement. presence but would not be nearly as effective in a real combat situation as the drone swarm.
  • derefr 5y ago
    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 methods for medium-level subsumptive motor control.
    • robotresearcher 5y ago
      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.
      • derefr 5y ago
        There are a lot of use-cases for which a tethered telepresence robot (with, say, a five-minute emergency battery for getting swapping from one wall-socket to another) would work just fine. You wouldn't see infantry drones, but it'd work for most anything that occurs solely inside a building.
        • robotresearcher 5y ago
• eplanit 5y ago
  The only missing parts are the weapons themselves.
• okwubodu 5y ago
  It would take a lot. Humans can be incredibly brutal when their opponents aren’t alive. Autonomous drones are more of a threat and even then a ballon full of string would put most out of commission. edit: that’s not to say they’ll never be an issue. They almost certainly will, but fighter jets can’t hold ground and neither can any robot.
• sirsinsalot 5y ago
  Part of the issue in tech is we shrug off the control we have over the future. "If it can be done then it is inevitable" seems to be a common attitude. A bit like the GitHub AI coding controversy. Yes, we maybe could AI ourselves out of a job, maybe? We can decide not to tho. We have complete control over what we DO and DO NOT. If humanity could organise well enough, we could collectively decide a weaponless utopia. But alas, we are stupid.
• mattlondon 5y ago
  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.
  • robotresearcher 5y ago
    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.
• Taniwha 5y ago
  I'm sure there's similar video, in the Pentagon, showing them handling weapons - it's just not as good PR to release those videos
• thefounder 5y ago
  It's just policy and tools. Regardless of the tools used certain policies are enforced. The robots/technologies are just tools. You have opreasive govenments spanning generations without robots and you have democracies as well. I certainly want more robots around to do the boring and risky jobs. Even if wars are conducted using robots(which is pretty innevitable) I see it as a good thing. The best tech wins instead of the most barbarian or the better propaganda machine.