Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/12/look-how-much-boston-dynamics.html
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As always, Boston Dynamics does amazing work with walking robots.
Kind of a shame no one has yet devised a practical use for walking robots in a world where treads exist.
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Am I the only person who’s bothered by the Boston Dynamics demo videos that show the humans abusing the robots by knocking them over and moving the packages they’re trying to pick up?
Have you people not seen The Matrix or the Terminator movies?! This is how it starts.
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No, you are not alone in that.
Also:
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I mean, I’m not sure treads are the best way to navigate broken terrain at multiple levels–like the one the Terminator T-2 is leaping on above.
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The mistake isn’t enslaving or abusing robots. The mistake is to make robots who CARE if they get enslaved or abused.
Basically, don’t build robots like C-3PO which are programmed to experience pain and fear and suffering and humiliation. Build robots like IG-11 who are just as content to self-destruct as they are to do anything else.
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Yeah, but they had to invent a parkour course specifically to show off what this particular robot could do. What’s the scenario in which you’d NEED a robot to leap over crates like that?
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Collapsed/exploded building?
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10 years ago: “Plodding along, going to work, hooked up to the world by wires that constrict me. Oh no, not again.”
Now: “Hup, hup, hup, hup!!! All your base are belong to us!”
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We already have treaded robots for investigating rubble and disaster areas, most of which would be too unstable for parkour anyway.
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Humans are bad enough at walking, and they’ve got tons of processing power. Why people focus on bipedal robots is mystifying. There are myriad designs that are way more practical.
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2019 jumps a lot better than Gordon Freeman.
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I’ll give them this: there’s definitely a lot of potential for those things in the entertainment industry. Animatronic characters in amusement parks, smart toys, Westworld-style sexbots, etc.
Other than that there isn’t any particular reason to design a functional robot in the form of a human being.
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These will probably be used by the armed forces, and although being bipedal might not be the most efficient design, they’ll look more imposing in war if they look human.
Pedantry alert!
From the post:
On the left, a tethered robot from 2009 hobbles on a treadmill. On the right, an untethered 2019 version agiley bounds over a pyramid of crates.
agiley agilely 
This is where I ask if the developers watched I, Robot. Where are the short dishwashing robots equipped with a very large and easily-accessible OFF switch? 
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Seems like yesterday that Cyberdyne released the herky-jerky T800. Look how far we’ve come!
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How about going into a burning building to rescue (or recover) victims? No joke: a former co-worker’s husband died doing just that. Smoke, debris, disorientation. A robot that has IR vision, GPS orientation, and no need to breathe? Yeah, I’ll pay for the FD to have those.
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Still no reason to think a bipedal humanoid robot would be better at the task than any other design. A treaded robot would be able to enter a burning building and drag out human bodies at least as well as parkour-bot here, and would be less likely to destabilize the structure with all that jumping around.
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Make sure we never program them to know what that switch does otherwise the metal bastards will keep turning each other on again.
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Even 4 legs would be better.
4 robot legs good, 2 robot legs bad.
I’m getting a faint feeling this is a bad idea…
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