There’s a character you see a lot in science fiction. Basically, you start with a futuristic world in which it’s mostly accepted as normal for androids to walk among us. Into that world, you place a gruff, old-school hero, who has total disdain and/or even hatred for all robots.
Examples:
Harrison Ford in Star Wars, whose Han Solo is constantly annoyed by the presence of C3PO.
Will Smith’s Del Spooner in I, Robot, whose defining characteristic is his nostalgia for a time before his own, in which technology hadn’t quite yet taken over all of society.
Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in the Aliens movies. Given that a devious android disguised as a human nearly leads her to a gruesome death in the first movie, her antipathy is understandable.
Now, I think of myself as a very tech-friendly guy. But after indications over the last month or two that we’re at the dawn of the age of humanoid robots, I’ve noticed I’m moving hard and fast in the Solo-Spooner-Ripley direction.
I give you three tech triggers:
First, we start with the humanoid robot that Elon Musk says Tesla is working on. As Musk put it, Tesla cars are “like semi-sentient robots on wheels [so] it kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form.”
As of now, they have nothing; literally, just an actor who dressed up as a robot for Tesla's AI Day event. Yet Musk says he thinks they’ll have a working prototype—5-foot-8, weighing 125 pounds—by next year.
I am not reassured by Musk’s promise that his robot, just a shade under the size of UFC champion Conor McGregor, would be designed so that average humans could run away from it, and “most likely overpower it.”
Strike 1.
Next up, we have Boston Dynamics. These are the kind of cool but scary-looking dog-robots that I’m sure you’ve seen over the last few years. If not, here’s one of them dancing at a college football halftime show earlier this month.
That’s about the best foot forward you’ll see on these things, which most often look terrifying in videos. (The company’s CEO says it “really bothers” him when he hears that reaction.)
Boston Dynamics says it’s sold “several hundred” robots, which according to CNBC have been used for “inspections at construction sites, oil rigs, nuclear plants, to check the vital signs of COVID-19 patients in hospitals, and even remind people to maintain social distance amid the pandemic.”
I don’t spend a lot of time on construction sites, oil rigs, and nuclear plants, but I’m still unnerved.
(Side note from Kate: My university obtained a “Spot” robot in June to help with hazardous environment studies. I’m…not entirely okay with this, on the grounds of being at the center of the Robot Uprising someday.)
Strike 2.
Finally, for today’s purposes, we have Amazon’s new $1,000 Astro mobile spybot.
Er, I mean, “home robot.”
This one is at least tiny and kind of cute because it rolls around with a video screen face making sad puppy dog eyes. It brings you drinks if you tell it to. It lets you do video calls via its face. It apparently has a creepy-looking telescopic periscope, and the ability to live-stream anything that happens in your home to anywhere in the world.
Yeah. Um, no.
It’s “designed to track the behavior of everyone in your home to help it perform its surveillance and helper duties,” according to Vice, which says it obtained internal development documents and video recordings of Astro software development meetings that make it seem a little less cutesy.
Strike 3.
So, call for comments: Robots, yay, nay, or “Murph, this is still science fiction” ? Also: I would not be surprised to learn we have a few robotics engineers among our readers. What am I missing above?
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Seems related: Dozens of drones floated through the skies of Tel Aviv on Monday, ferrying cartons of ice cream and sushi across the city in an experiment that officials hope provided a glimpse of the not-too-distant future. (AP)
A “mystery boom” shook parts of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine over the weekend. There was no earthquake recorded and the military has denied any supersonic flights at the time. So what was it? (HuffPost)
“Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott … on Monday barred all COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the state by any entity, including private employers.” Google, Facebook, and of course Tesla are among the big companies with many employees there; and both American and Southwest Airlines, which have announced mandatory employee vaccinations, are Texas-based. (Thomson Reuters)
A US Navy nuclear engineer and his wife have been charged with trying to sell nuclear secrets hidden inside a peanut butter sandwich to someone they thought was a foreign spy...but who was really an FBI agent. (BBC)
A Florida sheriff’s department posted to Facebook looking for the “rightful owner” of more than 700 pounds of marijuana seized from a rented storage facility, offering said owner a “fully paid staycation” in a “secure location.” (USA Today)
Small farmers are hoping to cash in on solar power to supplement their earnings. (Christian Science Monitor)
Humans have apparently been smoking tobacco for more than 12,000 years, according to new evidence from a dig site in Utah. (Reuters)
Thanks for reading, as always. Photo credit: Pixabay. Want to see all my mistakes? Click here.
Bill- I'm with you with the 3 strikes! Also, have to say I am finding your morning Understandably email to me be my go-to email and unsubscribing to many others I used to read. Thanks for doing such a great job of keeping us informed and adding your twist to it :)
Robots, like any other tool, can be used for good or not good. In looking over the three examples in your article, the one that worries me the most is the last one, the Spybot. Data security has been an issue for a long time and with something that is specifically tasked with monitoring our behavior in the home 24/7, this is something that George Orwell would have touted as one of Big Brother's best tools for keeping an eye on the public. Amazon is notorious for selling off data on their customers, so who knows where that info might wind up? I believe that this is a legitimate concern for general home use. For elder care, in a residential care facility, these could be a real boon, however. It's all about how and where they deployed.
The other two, Musk's "I'm Not Really A Robot" and the robot dog, with regards to their potential combat capability, the first is no threat since it doesn't exist and the second can be knocked over quite easily, or even just covered with a heavy blanket to block its sensors. Given that Musk's goal is to have a robot weighing in at 125lb, the combat capabilities of that frame would also be quite limited as well since the actuators, servos, etc. would only have a limited amount of space and, consequently, a limited amount of strength. Defensively, it would also not be able to carry much in the way of armor, again, due to power limits. This isn't to say that Musk won't be able to build a bigger, stronger, model, but, again, speed and agility will still be very limited in a humanoid form factor for quite some time.