If you watch this and your imagination doesn't run in the direction of evil robot army.. well, your imaginations doesn't work the same way as mine does.
I see a drone fleet of 100 bulky trucks galloping along contested highways towards a city boiling over with the violence of several simultaneous wars. They're protected by speed and dozens of armed UAVs. 96 make it through. Acceptable losses. The first truck to unload its four legged robotic soldiers loses 30 units to the welcome party, a quarter. By the time the tenth one is unloading, they're not losing any. The last robo-dog is unloaded just 18 minutes after the first truck arrives. By that time, there are over 10,000 dogs in squad-packs seeking targets from a database of 7,000 known enemy combatants and seeking control of strategically important sites.
there's something uncanny and creepy about how robots move once they've been riddled with armor piercing rounds. A leg stops working or a sensor gets damaged and it's impossible not to imagine that it's an injured animal in excruciating pain. The single minded resolve thug, that's all machine. If you're shooting off legs, you need to shoot off all four before these things will stop.
Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy?
That is a compelling visual. Another one might be that the truck drops off its dogs carrying first aid supplies and disperse though out the city looking for victims of some disaster. Human instinct is to go with threat first, friend later, I expect that served us well during our cave years.
Humans have had a standoff attack capability for a while, and yet the number of deaths due to "war" has been going down for a while.(I'll admit that I'm not sure what to call the ISIL thing.) So where does that leave us? In a place where managing outbreaks with the lowest possible loss of life to non-combatants. And if you believe the narrative that the police are shooting people because they 'fear for officer safety' then you can certainly make the argument that an officer that is on site in a teleoperated way has no personal risk and should therefore not shoot anyone or anything except to save the life or lives of innocent civilians. But we all know that is impractical in a non-war situation.
...and as the last human alive scrambles up a steep hill, with 100 robo-dogs close behind, he stops and drops to his knees as he finds himself overlooking a steep cliff, with no where left to run.
"Why?", he looks up and asks the first robot, as it skids to a stop next to him.
One by one, a dozen other robo-dogs surround the human.
An armored plate drops open on the chest of the first robo-dog, revealing a small lcd screen.
And the above YouTube video begins to play.
The video stops after showing the callous human kicking Spot, the proto-ancestor of all the robo-dogs present on this hill.
The kicking scene begins to repeat on the screen, like an old gif.
And silently (for the robo-dogs were never given a true voice box), the leader lifts one robotic leg and with a single powerful pneumatic kick to his ribs, sends the last human alive flailing over the edge of the cliff.
Look at it another way. People involved in deadly combat have a kill or be killed mentality. Extreme caution for personal risk means you have to shoot first and ask questions later in a war zone. Not so for robots. Send them in to take prisoners. If they are destroyed, build another. Charge them until the enemy runs out of bullets. Send them close enough to use non-lethal rounds or wound legs and move on. And forget about looting and rape. Forget about collateral damage caused by bombing city blocks from the sky and hoping most inhabitants are bad. Imagine if we could shut down ISIS with $500M worth of material and no lives lost.
The database is a more worrying prospect than the robots, in a lot of ways. Who gets to designate "known" and "enemy"? What if it's the Tinder eigenfaces program? Automatable ethnic cleansing?
Then what of the occupation? Robots aren't great for political legitimacy. Do you have them return fire on the kids throwing rocks at them? Unlike human guards I suppose they can sustain IED losses forever. But they're an A1 prime target for hackers...
Yeah, there should be an equal amount of parallel effort put into developing technologies that would allow us to destroy these machines and permanently disable their subsystems. Today, politicians still have to convince people to commit industrialized murder - tomorrow, the robots will obey orders without delay.
I don't know if this is such a huge game changer for war. I mean, we had wheels for solid ground, and machines that can fly through the air, and boats for water, and hovercrafts for ambiguous terrain. These cute dogs are ultimately not that revolutionary.
I am much, much more worried about evil applications of multirotor drones.
Anyway, all of the above is an exercise in futility without decent AI. The robot dogs can run - so what? As long as they're pretty dumb they can't do much damage.
Now, an AI running a dog chassis, or flying a quadcopter, that's an "interesting" thought.
Just reading Bing West's A Million Steps, so that obviously is affecting me, but the first thing I thought was this would be great for saving soldiers from getting blown up by IEDs.
It is creepy as hell to watch them walk, and that makes me wonder what groups like ISIL would think about being hunted by a small pack of them.
Right now dropping bombs on houses kills some terrorists, but the collateral damage has a side-effect of bringing more to their cause. Would attack robots scare the shit out of them and make them stop, or just backfire and end up as another recruiting tool for fundamentalists?
I imagine swarms of quadcopters would be better for that task. Less chance of being blocked by physical barriers and lower cost = more units. They're so cheap you wouldn't even need rounds, just pack on some explosives and self destruct when near.
... for 3 minutes, until the batteries give out and they all need to be charged for 5-6 hours.
(But actually, what is the battery life on these things? You still have the problem of heavier battery = more drain on battery. I wonder where the break-even point is?)
yeah, i've always kind of scoffed at the people saying boston dynamics robots are scary. They're an amazing technical accomplishment and they make me really excited and happy to see them.
but as soon as i saw that shot of two robot dogs side-by-side, moving in almost synchronicity, something turned in the pit of my stomach. There's something very dystopian sci-fi about that image.
Its current intended military application is to carry equipment. Ammunition, spare parts, weapons, food and the like. Many US Army soldiers carry 70-80 lbs of gear into combat. The idea is to lighten that load by having machines carry some of it, in order to save lives and shorten conflicts. Wheeled vehicles don't work on a lot of terrain types, hence robot dogs.
Robots don't feel pain or a sense of injustice when you kick them. It's no different than kicking a washing machine or a car tire. It looks like an animal out of necessity, to be able to follow humans while walking over uneven ground. But it's just a device. If it can't take a few kicks how can it be counted on to climb a hill or navigate a jungle?
Somewhere out there, a 19 year old kid is about to carry 80 pounds of gear on a 10 mile march in order to be shot at upon reaching his destination. The only thing he cares about is living to see tomorrow's sunrise. Kick the hell out of the damn robots.
I don't really get feeling bad about kicking the robot, must just be that it looks so much like an animal. Speaking from military experience I can say being able to kick it out of the way is extremely useful, it may be between me and the closest cover from enemy fire, or it might be about to step on a mine or IED.
Looks very promising, hopefully future versions can come with built in light armor. That would be a dream come true for many grunts out there, letting a robot carry your extra supplies and also provide cover from small arms and shrapnel.
> Many US Army soldiers carry 70-80 lbs of gear into combat. The idea is to lighten that load by having machines carry some of it, in order to save lives and shorten conflicts.
Minor correction: from talking with folks at the Naval Research Lab, it sounds like soldiers empirically will respond to lighter loads by packing in more until they hit the target weight (more batteries, more ammo, more armor, etc.). Of course, this is just good evidence that they value the effectively higher capacity even more than they would less weight.
Oddly enough I can't help but feel a bit sorry for the robot getting kicked back and forth there. I know you want to demonstrate how stable it is, but damn guys, no need to be so cruel!
The military interests in these machines seem to go in the direction of what you could call drones on the ground.
Invading an area on the ground is still necessary to occupy and maintain control. Air-based drones are used more for targeted attacks and assasinations, with documented collateral damage, or killing and terrorizing of civilian populations put less eloquently.
With drones on the ground, the situation changes completely, and you can have much more control over areas without putting any soldiers lives at risk.
This would make occupations much more cost effective, probably mostly in the PR sense, any government getting lots of their youth killed will sooner or later have a problem at home. Not so much with drones.
Oh noes - the robot army is here! Those submarines with the power to end life as we know it (basically post 19th century life), we've forgotten about them, let's all get worried about the robot army!
What I mean is, it's not autonomy that you should worry about, it's actuators. The biggest actuators are nuclear weapons - a trident sub can slap 200 warheads that are 50* bigger than Hiroshima's onto a given continent, and the fires would blot the sun from the sky for two years. There are 7 billion agents with autonomy knocking around, and the type that they are derived from has a bad record about doing dumb evil things!
Cool AI would probably be a safer arbiter of our extinction.
The kicking is a playful reference to the reaction people had when they showed the original BigDog demonstration (also with the kick test). Hence the "No robots were harmed in the making of this video" at the end.
Perhaps also a clever way to build sympathy for what might otherwise be a somewhat scary machine.
I vaguely recall that when the BD acquisition was announced there was speculation that Google might use these for package delivery, but not sure whether that came directly from Google or not.
What are the simplest applications of these? Has it been made known what direction(s) Google intend to take this in?
Aww, I really feel bad for the robot when he gets kicked, more so because this model is so small. And the animal-like stabilization motions don't help either. Great work by Boston Dynamics
It seems like using these devices for delivery is one possible end goal (besides the obvious military applications). A self driving truck alone cannot deliver packages to your front door. However put one of these robot dogs inside and figure out some way for it to pick up and drop off packages and suddenly you can take on FedEx/UPS/etc.
Side note, anyone else really want to ride one of these?
For the folks have an emotional reaction to the kick and re-stabilization, I am reminded of the interesting way Anime has intentionally provoked this response as an art form. The other day I was watching a Ghost in the Shell ARISE episode, and the carrier Logicom is a pink death machine with a cute voice. Makes me realize how good certain aspects are of Japanese sci-fi. I commented previously on adding a white shell to the body to make it more appealing. Maybe Boston Dynamics is keeping them like this on purpose? Maybe they are purposefully trying to reduce the anthropomorphic attachment level?
[+] [-] netcan|11 years ago|reply
I see a drone fleet of 100 bulky trucks galloping along contested highways towards a city boiling over with the violence of several simultaneous wars. They're protected by speed and dozens of armed UAVs. 96 make it through. Acceptable losses. The first truck to unload its four legged robotic soldiers loses 30 units to the welcome party, a quarter. By the time the tenth one is unloading, they're not losing any. The last robo-dog is unloaded just 18 minutes after the first truck arrives. By that time, there are over 10,000 dogs in squad-packs seeking targets from a database of 7,000 known enemy combatants and seeking control of strategically important sites.
there's something uncanny and creepy about how robots move once they've been riddled with armor piercing rounds. A leg stops working or a sensor gets damaged and it's impossible not to imagine that it's an injured animal in excruciating pain. The single minded resolve thug, that's all machine. If you're shooting off legs, you need to shoot off all four before these things will stop.
Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
Humans have had a standoff attack capability for a while, and yet the number of deaths due to "war" has been going down for a while.(I'll admit that I'm not sure what to call the ISIL thing.) So where does that leave us? In a place where managing outbreaks with the lowest possible loss of life to non-combatants. And if you believe the narrative that the police are shooting people because they 'fear for officer safety' then you can certainly make the argument that an officer that is on site in a teleoperated way has no personal risk and should therefore not shoot anyone or anything except to save the life or lives of innocent civilians. But we all know that is impractical in a non-war situation.
[+] [-] swamp40|11 years ago|reply
"Why?", he looks up and asks the first robot, as it skids to a stop next to him.
One by one, a dozen other robo-dogs surround the human.
An armored plate drops open on the chest of the first robo-dog, revealing a small lcd screen.
And the above YouTube video begins to play.
The video stops after showing the callous human kicking Spot, the proto-ancestor of all the robo-dogs present on this hill.
The kicking scene begins to repeat on the screen, like an old gif.
And silently (for the robo-dogs were never given a true voice box), the leader lifts one robotic leg and with a single powerful pneumatic kick to his ribs, sends the last human alive flailing over the edge of the cliff.
[+] [-] tootie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
The database is a more worrying prospect than the robots, in a lot of ways. Who gets to designate "known" and "enemy"? What if it's the Tinder eigenfaces program? Automatable ethnic cleansing?
Then what of the occupation? Robots aren't great for political legitimacy. Do you have them return fire on the kids throwing rocks at them? Unlike human guards I suppose they can sustain IED losses forever. But they're an A1 prime target for hackers...
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
This is just goes further in the same direction.
[+] [-] scotty79|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btbuildem|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] joubert|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
I am much, much more worried about evil applications of multirotor drones.
Anyway, all of the above is an exercise in futility without decent AI. The robot dogs can run - so what? As long as they're pretty dumb they can't do much damage.
Now, an AI running a dog chassis, or flying a quadcopter, that's an "interesting" thought.
[+] [-] riggins|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jimmytucson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobu|11 years ago|reply
Right now dropping bombs on houses kills some terrorists, but the collateral damage has a side-effect of bringing more to their cause. Would attack robots scare the shit out of them and make them stop, or just backfire and end up as another recruiting tool for fundamentalists?
[+] [-] Jack000|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superuser2|11 years ago|reply
(But actually, what is the battery life on these things? You still have the problem of heavier battery = more drain on battery. I wonder where the break-even point is?)
[+] [-] geon|11 years ago|reply
I was just watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc for the n:th time. It's hilarious.
[+] [-] snissn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|11 years ago|reply
but as soon as i saw that shot of two robot dogs side-by-side, moving in almost synchronicity, something turned in the pit of my stomach. There's something very dystopian sci-fi about that image.
[+] [-] legohead|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdkl234890|11 years ago|reply
They are owned by Google now. But let's not pretend Google's don't be evil policy makes a big difference these days.
[+] [-] kmfrk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmacondon|11 years ago|reply
Its current intended military application is to carry equipment. Ammunition, spare parts, weapons, food and the like. Many US Army soldiers carry 70-80 lbs of gear into combat. The idea is to lighten that load by having machines carry some of it, in order to save lives and shorten conflicts. Wheeled vehicles don't work on a lot of terrain types, hence robot dogs.
Robots don't feel pain or a sense of injustice when you kick them. It's no different than kicking a washing machine or a car tire. It looks like an animal out of necessity, to be able to follow humans while walking over uneven ground. But it's just a device. If it can't take a few kicks how can it be counted on to climb a hill or navigate a jungle?
Somewhere out there, a 19 year old kid is about to carry 80 pounds of gear on a 10 mile march in order to be shot at upon reaching his destination. The only thing he cares about is living to see tomorrow's sunrise. Kick the hell out of the damn robots.
[+] [-] Wohlf|11 years ago|reply
Looks very promising, hopefully future versions can come with built in light armor. That would be a dream come true for many grunts out there, letting a robot carry your extra supplies and also provide cover from small arms and shrapnel.
[+] [-] jessriedel|11 years ago|reply
Minor correction: from talking with folks at the Naval Research Lab, it sounds like soldiers empirically will respond to lighter loads by packing in more until they hit the target weight (more batteries, more ammo, more armor, etc.). Of course, this is just good evidence that they value the effectively higher capacity even more than they would less weight.
[+] [-] csomar|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DangerousPie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blechx|11 years ago|reply
Invading an area on the ground is still necessary to occupy and maintain control. Air-based drones are used more for targeted attacks and assasinations, with documented collateral damage, or killing and terrorizing of civilian populations put less eloquently.
With drones on the ground, the situation changes completely, and you can have much more control over areas without putting any soldiers lives at risk.
This would make occupations much more cost effective, probably mostly in the PR sense, any government getting lots of their youth killed will sooner or later have a problem at home. Not so much with drones.
I find this a very frightening development.
[+] [-] sgt101|11 years ago|reply
What I mean is, it's not autonomy that you should worry about, it's actuators. The biggest actuators are nuclear weapons - a trident sub can slap 200 warheads that are 50* bigger than Hiroshima's onto a given continent, and the fires would blot the sun from the sky for two years. There are 7 billion agents with autonomy knocking around, and the type that they are derived from has a bad record about doing dumb evil things!
Cool AI would probably be a safer arbiter of our extinction.
[+] [-] sfjailbird|11 years ago|reply
Perhaps also a clever way to build sympathy for what might otherwise be a somewhat scary machine.
[+] [-] beltex|11 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/565181590431485952
[+] [-] rbobby|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz_pl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] on_and_off|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moreati|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoster|11 years ago|reply
What are the simplest applications of these? Has it been made known what direction(s) Google intend to take this in?
[+] [-] nl|11 years ago|reply
Q: How do you escape a killer robot?
A: Walk up some stairs.
Might be time to reevaluate my escape strategy.
[+] [-] TheLoneWolfling|11 years ago|reply
Q: How do you escape a killer robot?
A: Climb a ladder.
[+] [-] Simp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dEnigma|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbart|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acadien|11 years ago|reply
Side note, anyone else really want to ride one of these?
[+] [-] jobigoud|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmikaeld|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] q2|11 years ago|reply
I read Google has self-driving cars project. Now it seems we can have self-driving bikes/two-wheelers in future.
Also, we see/hear about vehicular/car accidents and in future I won't be surprised to hear/see "robot accidents".
[+] [-] higherpurpose|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] binarymax|11 years ago|reply