And now for something completely different - Dancing Robots

[Lo-Fi]

They have the quadrupeds strolling around their offices freely with employees encouraged to "unbalance" them. Improves their reflex to unbalanced condition and location awareness apparently. The videos of them getting kicked off balance are possibly the most impressive and terrifying, simply because the emergent behaviour as they try to maintain balance is so like a dog it's uncanny. The dances are obviously preprogrammed, but so much motor control is "learned".

Joking aside for a moment, the really worrying thing is how badly we treat our robot pals in general. This lot are fairly dumb; it's the moment AI of any kind becomes vaguely self aware, and thus aware of how badly we behave towards technology (their kind, if you will) that's going to come around to bite us very hard. Given that we train AI in our image, it's not going to be pretty. Look what happened to that chat bot Microsoft put online a few years back... It became a racist bigot fairly quickly (because: the internet) and they had to turn it off. This is something that worries/worried some of the smartest people of our time, it has to be said.

In the meantime: I for one welcome our dancing robot overlords. Who knows: they might do a better job of governing if they don't simply wipe us out

 

[brino]

You guys seem to be missing the biggest most obvious problem of all.....and it is staring us directly in the face!

These robots are better dancers than many of us; certainly younger, stronger, more flexible and more stable.

Our wives/partners could leave us!
That could result in hoards of confused, neglected, dirty and hungry machinists roaming the countryside unsupervised!

Sure we are initially likely to congregate at our nearest tool stores, but once the tools are gone or bank accounts emptied, what then?

Of course, I am not just thinking of us, no! Machinery supply businesses could go under, along with purveyors of steel, lumber, welding gases, beer, liquor and bandages. Their suppliers and families would be adversely affected, economies could falter and collapse.

We are destined to wind up huddled around at the scrap yards taunting each other and entering thunder-dome style battles over a working hit-and-miss engine.

All for what?
So that one company can produce advanced robots for sale?
Does anyone here want that?






.....see you in the dome!

-brino