Pretty weird & unsettling...

[GHT]

The folks at Boston Dynamics do have a sense of humor, though:

No they don't, she's too PC, no white beard.

 

[Fading Fast]

...I would hope that the company producing this robot realized that their film, the way it was staged, produced an emotional reaction in a subset of people. And that's poor staging if you want to show off what your neat toy can do. Hence my question of it being a social experiment.

If they're building robots they can't be that dumb, can they?

This is spot on. Since all are long time posters, I know everyone on this thread is very smart and understands that testing robots to see how they respond to challenges is logical and rational, but the way this film was made and edited felt less like an agnostic and rational test of the robot and more like a snarky (thank you Lizzie) attempt to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. And if that is the case, then yup, I'm left to wonder why they did that and I don't have a great feeling about the smallness of the, obviously, smart but, IMHO, smug robot builders.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I'd argue feeling bad about a historic building you have zero connection being remuddled is about as logical as feeling bad for a robot getting "pushed around." I also feel bad when I see an old car get chopped up for "art," and that's a machine too.

I would argue that your feelings of sorrow are not empathy for the building or the car, but for other humans who will no longer get a chance to see it/experience it.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Let he who has never had an emotional attachment to an inanimate object, have the first swing of the hockey stick.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I think that it is an engineering thing. An engineer looks at the films and sees a remarkable machine "solving" difficult problems of location and balance. A person looks at the films and sees a strange and disquieting humanoid thing being teased.

Wait a second...are you suggesting engineers aren't "persons"? Why some of my best friends are engineers...

 

[vitanola]

Wait a second...are you suggesting engineers aren't "persons"? Why some of my best friends are engineers...

Well, we often don't seem to be considered full persons...

Now, of course the rigors of an engineering education do tend to limit the breadth of an engineer's acculturation, if the engineer in question begins school at eighteen and ends it at twenty-two. These disadvantages may be overcome if one so desires, but at the cost of some considerable effort and social disapprobation.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I have a friend who went to MIT in the '80s. She was the only woman in most of her classes, and reports that most of her classmates were -- ah -- not especially ept when it came to basic social functioning. But if you needed a police car hoisted to the top of a high domed building, they were definitely the ones to call.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Wait a second...are you suggesting engineers aren't "persons"? .

No they ain't, they're ears for engines.

Mechanical engineers design weapons, Civil engineers design targets & Bio-engineers ensure that everyone can have a turkey leg for Christmas dinner.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

The robot is anthropomorphic, so we unconsciously identify with it. What makes it upsetting is that the guy with the stick looks and acts like every schoolyard bully I ever encountered.

 

[GHT]

Bio-engineers ensure that everyone can have a turkey leg for Christmas dinner.

How do they do that? Cross a turkey with an octopus?

 

[HudsonHawk]

I have a friend who went to MIT in the '80s. She was the only woman in most of her classes, and reports that most of her classmates were -- ah -- not especially ept when it came to basic social functioning. But if you needed a police car hoisted to the top of a high domed building, they were definitely the ones to call.

Perhaps the dumbest guy I've ever met has a PhD from MIT, and was socially awkward in a might be a serial killer kind of way. He could name every member of John Tyler's cabinet off the top of his head, but he couldn't think his way out of an empty room.

 

[sheeplady]

I would argue that your feelings of sorrow are not empathy for the building or the car, but for other humans who will no longer get a chance to see it/experience it.

I'm not so sure. I certainly don't think, "oh, it's a loss for others." My thought process ends at, "how incredibly sad."

I'm much more likely to feel bad for the ones who built a razed historical building, if anything. And they are dead and gone (most likely).

 

[kaiser]

I have a friend who went to MIT in the '80s. She was the only woman in most of her classes, and reports that most of her classmates were -- ah -- not especially ept when it came to basic social functioning. But if you needed a police car hoisted to the top of a high domed building, they were definitely the ones to call.

I had a Prof. at College for Thermodynamics that was like that, he could fill up two black boards with formulas, but could not park his car without running either into the curb, or a lamp post.

 

[vitanola]

I'm not so sure. I certainly don't think, "oh, it's a loss for others." My thought process ends at, "how incredibly sad."

I'm much more likely to feel bad for the ones who built a razed historical building, if anything. And they are dead and gone (most likely).

There is something to the "empathy for machines". I remember the "Cash for Clunkers" campaign, when, as part of the economic stimulus package, old motor cars and trucks which had poor gas mileage were purchased and destroyed to get them off the road and encourage the sale of new, fuel efficient cars. The cars were destroyed by draining their engines of oil and coolant and filling the crankcase with a strong solution of magnesium silicate. The engine would the be run with a wide-open throttle until the unit seized. While I understood the idea behind this, and realize that it was ultimately successful at its intended purposes, the very idea of destroying a functional piece of machinery in this way still sets my teeth on edge, and makes me terribly, terribly sad in a way that, say, cracking the engine block with a sledge hammer, the preferred method of destruction in the 1930's auto buy-back campaign, does not.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm much more likely to feel bad for the ones who built a razed historical building, if anything. And they are dead and gone (most likely).

I feel the same way -- a building, any building, isn't a pile of rocks and wood and metal, it's the blood and sweat of the people who built it.

Anyone who's ever driven to Bar Harbor, Maine via US 1 will remember the old Waldo-Hancock bridge over the Penobscot River between Prospect and Verona Island. It was a beautiful tower-and-cable-and-rivet suspension bridge of the classic style, built in 1931, and its construction was a huge deal during the Depression. My grandfather was one of the workers who built that bridge, and I always felt great pride in that whenever we drove over it on the way to Bucksport. But it wasn't maintained well, and several years ago it was replaced by a new modernistic George Jetson eyesore of a bridge made of pre-cast concrete. They blew up the old bridge
and nothing's left of it now but the pilings. And I was immensely sad to see it go because it my grandfather's blood and sweat went into building it.

 

[GHT]

And I was immensely sad to see it go because it my grandfather's blood and sweat went into building it.

When a third of our railways were ripped up in the 60's & 70's, one line in particular drew great anger at it's destruction. The Great Central line, not only was it profitable, it was also a very fast line, the last main line to be built, with the straightest tracks and lowest inclines. It also had some magnificent structures. like the Brackley Viaduct.

Following closure, in an act of corporate vandalism, the viaduct was demolished to stop protesters from arguing for reopening of the line. If that wasn't enough, fifty years on, the government plans to build a new high speed line, almost parallel to the Great Central, at a cost of £70Billion. Madness.

 

[BriarWolf]

I'm actually a little surprised no one has commented on a more practical aspect of this gadget: that it can stock shelves. As I recall Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google, and Atlas uses the same sensor package as the Google driverless car. It immediately strikes me Google is trying to corner the industry of a potential automated transportation and logistics system. Once you work out the kinks, this technology gives you automated delivery trucks, robot workers to unload them, and Amazon is already making use of automated warehouse shelves that move about and sort themselves. Considering how many US jobs are rooted in transportation and logistics...

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

This is a terrible problem we will have to face within the next decade or two. Robots are taking the minimum-wage jobs. The people being put out of work are not skilled workers who can learn new skills. They are the unskilled who won't be able to find another minimum-wage job. There is now a machine that will make a hamburger, every step of the process from baking the bun to applying the mustard, without a human being involved. How many people are employed in the fast-food industry? What will we do with the unemployed when all the fast-food jobs, the janitorial work, the farm stoop labor, the yard work and drywall-hanging are all robotized? We'll have to deal with this situation within the next 10-20 years. Personally, I think the government needs to start cooking up some really good drugs so that people don't mind that they're jobless, homeless, broke and hungry.

 

[V.C. Brunswick]

There is something to the "empathy for machines". I remember the "Cash for Clunkers" campaign, when, as part of the economic stimulus package, old motor cars and trucks which had poor gas mileage were purchased and destroyed to get them off the road and encourage the sale of new, fuel efficient cars. The cars were destroyed by draining their engines of oil and coolant and filling the crankcase with a strong solution of magnesium silicate. The engine would the be run with a wide-open throttle until the unit seized. While I understood the idea behind this, and realize that it was ultimately successful at its intended purposes, the very idea of destroying a functional piece of machinery in this way still sets my teeth on edge, and makes me terribly, terribly sad in a way that, say, cracking the engine block with a sledge hammer, the preferred method of destruction in the 1930's auto buy-back campaign, does not.

And all it did was drive up the price of used cars when many of these cars were taken off the market.

 

[BriarWolf]

I'm convinced Cash For Clunkers was a scheme to get rid of old cars that people could actually fix themselves in order to force them to buy new vehicles that can only be maintained at dealer in order to pump more cash into the flagging auto industry and force dependency.

I regret my generation will be forced to endure the growing pains of mass automation. The massive permanent unemployment this could generate will either force the powers-at-be to consider measures like a Basic Guaranteed Income, or be prepared to wage a low intensity war against a population of idle, poor, angry, hopeless people. Given drones can't refuse to shoot civilians...and that's as far as I'm willing to push the No Politics rule.