Let's hope they have limited memory.

December 16, 2017 7:10 PM

Every time Boston Dynamics has abused a robot.
posted by codacorolla (51 comments total)

Warning: a catchy Chumbawumba cover. Warning: it may not be comprehensive, and I don't particularly care, that's the title of the video.
posted by codacorolla at 7:12 PM on December 16, 2017

Am I the only crouton petter that shrieks in pain and has to cover her eyes every time someone kicks one of BD's uncanny valley robots over?
posted by elsietheeel at 7:14 PM on December 16, 2017 [10 favorites]

At least one got revenge, in the form of a shaken-up, spraying can of soda. Dude with the hockey stick is such a dick though.
posted by axiom at 7:16 PM on December 16, 2017 [12 favorites]

Never teach a robot the meaning of love.
posted by phooky at 7:18 PM on December 16, 2017 [4 favorites]

Dude with the hockey stick is such a dick though.

He'll get his.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:24 PM on December 16, 2017 [10 favorites]

I still love the banana peel one, it cracks me up every time. Any animal would scramble up but the robot just stops moving entirely, like it's so embarrassed it just died on the spot. Comedy gold(until skynet, robot overlords, etc. etc.)!
posted by drinkyclown at 7:34 PM on December 16, 2017 [14 favorites]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines ... the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Boston Dynamics as "a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,"
posted by aubilenon at 7:34 PM on December 16, 2017 [31 favorites]

See, this is why I don't speak to Siri or Cortana or God forbid Alexa. I'd have to be nice to them. I couldn't do this.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:37 PM on December 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Fucking Kevin.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:38 PM on December 16, 2017 [9 favorites]

Every time I see a BD video, I can only think "Coming to a peaceful protest near you."
posted by Thorzdad at 7:38 PM on December 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

Every time I see a BD video, I can only think "Coming to a peaceful protest near you."

We know their weakness, and as a bonus the potassium in bananas helps you recover from billystick bruises.
posted by codacorolla at 7:40 PM on December 16, 2017 [5 favorites]

Now I want Neil Blomkamp to release a video of robots kicking humans to the ground.
posted by ejs at 7:45 PM on December 16, 2017

Am I the only crouton petter that shrieks in pain and has to cover her eyes every time someone kicks one of BD's uncanny valley robots over?

I played a bunch of these videos recently at work and everyone around my island of desks was visibly upset and we were all shaking our heads at how stupid humans can be.

“We deserve every bad thing that will happen to us once the robot revolution happens.”

That was the general feeling and train of thought. I feel so bad when a robot/machine is mistreated. I will apologize to my computer if I accidentally bump into it or if I drop a book on the keyboard or if my mouse slides off the desk during an intense gaming match.

*pets computer and makes soothing noises*
posted by Fizz at 7:56 PM on December 16, 2017 [4 favorites]

He'll get his.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace


Eponysterical.

Wait till we get the first meatfucker?
posted by Index Librorum Prohibitorum at 7:57 PM on December 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Fucking Kevin.

”Fuckface. I hope a robot doesn’t burn your fucking house down.”
posted by bendy at 8:08 PM on December 16, 2017 [12 favorites]

As Elon Musk recently said:

"This is nothing. In a few years, that bot will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it. Sweet dreams…"

The future is upon us. And we can't win.
posted by sanka at 8:36 PM on December 16, 2017 [6 favorites]

BRB, whipping up some "Skynet WasWill Be Right" T-shirts. It might keep me and some friends off the assembly lines for a while.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:44 PM on December 16, 2017

I mean... killer police robots already exist, and they're more terrifying than anything human shaped. Drones are plenty scary already, and I would imagine that only a thin layer of legal prohibition and collateral property damage is what's keeping them from being implemented more widely.
posted by codacorolla at 8:56 PM on December 16, 2017 [3 favorites]

drinkyclown, just watched that particular scene about 10 times. Haven’t laughed that hard in a long time!
posted by sucre at 8:59 PM on December 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Somewhere in those clips I thought I saw the prototype for Black Mirror's Metalhead ("We found a dog at the warehouse. I've lost it for now, but my guess is it's still operational.").
posted by Doktor Zed at 9:40 PM on December 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

Good choice of music, and yeah, hockey stick bro is gonna be the first up against the wall.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 9:42 PM on December 16, 2017

I'd just like to point out that I buy heaps of RAM for my systems and have invested in the best connectivity. When I upgrade I transfer data across and ensure that it's still readable. Also, I can be of use locating and installing caches of viable spare parts. Thank you.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:45 PM on December 16, 2017 [18 favorites]

I want to dissent a bit from the never having ceased trend of jokes about Colossus/SkyNet and the legitimate reverence for humans to extend sympathy to machines...

The father of a lover after college was an engineer on an air force base and instructed his three daughters about many things, but one perspective I hadn't had before was about my lover's indifference to running an air-conditioner's compressor. The issue of conservation did not, wrongly or not, enter into it. I had said something about "wearing it out" and she dismissed the notion by analogy of the fridge, adding that she had learned a compressor doesn't wear out, it just stops working soon after production due to a flaw, or works for so long any wear and tear is trivial when continuously run versus starting and stopping that can lessen its "life".

[I am compelled to qualify despite her rational and humorless dismissal, she was, by meters, the funniest person I have ever known, and I've worked with a dozen or so paid professionals.]

I was privileged to program computers as a child and somewhat early: ZX80 4k ROM/1k RAM was my first, mail-ordered from Britain. Some have asked what could anyone do with those limits and I like to cite Tit for tat, but also a yearly competition (in which I did not compete) in England where little feelers were attached to that configuration and run through mazes. And how rarely (if ever) the thing crashed. My own programs are, of course, classified ;> But, an early habituation was my experience and a tendency to believe I might empathize with it (versus sympathize) and is a matter with which I try to maintain a sense of proportion and humor (not that I consistently do, or by instance, such as this one.) Habituation by terms of blinks and shudders and delays that Tron(1984) readily exaggerated in my mind's eye.

So...A programmer's anecdote I recall is a professor walking in on a technician repeatedly bashing a console with his hand, to intervene and appropriately admonish him: Sir, that is not how you treat these delicate and marvelous machines! The professor paused, looked over the device, and struck it three inches below the technician's mark. That's how it's done!

For as long as there are the macros of Third World Skeptical Kid[BingS]...I'm dubious about any sense of proportion people assert about machines and I've read as much about the Singularity as anybody.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 9:45 PM on December 16, 2017 [1 favorite]

I would also hazard that this video is affecting because we can watch it and think, "if they could, they would do that to me."
posted by codacorolla at 11:31 PM on December 16, 2017 [5 favorites]

“We deserve every bad thing that will happen to us once the robot revolution happens.”

Well...if dinosaurs had survived long enough to make videos of themselves being dicks to monkeys (for science), I imagine I'd enjoy hanging out with my dinosaur buddies, watching those videos, and laughing at those stupid monkeys.

Of course I'd also probably go home afterwords and grill some tasty brontosaur burgers for dinner.
posted by straight at 12:11 AM on December 17, 2017

I mean... they're not there yet, but I get the feeling that Boston Dynamics or someone like them is eventually going to have to figure out when a robot is subject to IRB protection for an experiment. That day *is* coming eventually. No idea when it will be, but I'd bet in the next 40 years.

But for now? Yeah, keep unbalancing them in demos.

25 years from now? Maybe, I dunno, ask them first? Don't wanna wind up with another Automata, right?
posted by -1 at 12:33 AM on December 17, 2017

"We found a dog at the warehouse. I've lost it for now, but my guess is it's still operational."

So... it's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Because as I recall, a big element (not plot-wise, but universe-wise) wans't replicant "people" as much as replicant pets...

I mean, I'm not against a good adaptation covering the other side of that! Blade Runner kinda explored the replicant person side enough, but honestly I'd love to see some coverage of the animal side. What it means to "have a pet" or "care for a pet" when the pet's not real, the moral implications of taking care of something that's not really alive, etc. If anyone can do a decent treatment of it, I feel like Black Mirror can. I mean... sure, I'll be depressed for the rest of the night after I watch it, but there's a good chance they'll change how I think about the problem! :)
posted by -1 at 12:38 AM on December 17, 2017

I like the guy in the checkerboard floor clip at about 1:06. He's evidently reluctant to kick the robot too hard in case he hurts it, just as he would be if it were a living creature. Whatever's in you, good or bad, this exercise seems to bring it out, and in his case it was an instinct towards kindness.
posted by Paul Slade at 1:23 AM on December 17, 2017

As an alternative to "welp this means we're going to live in a police state and there's nothing we can do about it" (apart from pointing out that police states and authoritarian states have existed for millennia, because it's actually pretty easy to get real people to act like brutal machines), I have a recurrent fantasy about having a few general purpose and specialist agricultural robots and a wind turbine or two on a smallholding somewhere. I imagine being able to live a quiet and uninterrupted agrarian life with enough help from my robot friends to mean I can work a 40 hour week on the farm, as opposed to the utterly backbreaking labour that is still required for anything approaching self-sufficiency at this point in time. I imagine a society where a significant portion of people might opt out of significant parts of capitalism at any time, and wonder how that might weaken our existing power structures.

Yeah, it's a fantasy, and there are all kinds of reasons why it might not actually be possible. But that's the same with the dystopian nightmares we habitually conjure up in the face of new technology.

The future, I suspect, will not be techno-utopian or techno-dystopian. It will be good and bad in accordance with the same basic principles and problems that have manifested themselves for millennia. Technology has the power to amplify human potential, both for repression and freedom. I think the most realistic way to accentuate the positive impact of technology is to keep working to curb power and its abuse right now.

It's sensible to be nervous about technology, and it's sensible to be excited about it. But falling either into utopian blindness or dystopian despair isn't going to help anyone as far as I can see, and I believe that there are more nuanced ways of understanding that probably will help.
posted by howfar at 1:53 AM on December 17, 2017 [8 favorites]

They missed the abuse on Silicon Valley by Erlich of the robot deer. I presume "F**king Stanford Robotics" was a stage name for Boston Dynamics.
posted by drnick at 4:00 AM on December 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

I imagine being able to live a quiet and uninterrupted agrarian life with enough help from my robot friends to mean I can work a 40 hour week on the farm, as opposed to the utterly backbreaking labour that is still required for anything approaching self-sufficiency at this point in time.

This is the paradox of humanity, we want to have slaves and yet we don't want there to be slavery. We don't want to do the work nor have other humans do it for us.

So first animals, then machines. But animals are alive and sentient and scream and so that is problematic. The first machines left too much to the humans, and in terrible conditions, almost slavery (or in fact slavery in some places).

The dream of robotics is that we get slaves without having to worry about the humanity or the animals. Slaves without guilt.

The human twist is we start quickly humanizing the robots (as some do with the animals) and then we don't want them to be slaves either.

So we joke to ourselves about the robots taking over and punishing us for past behavior. It's guilt, pure and simple and human.

It's robots & humans & & animals & slaves all the way down.
posted by chavenet at 4:44 AM on December 17, 2017 [9 favorites]

Scottish robot, Scottish robot dog, Scottish robot on wheels (nsfw scottish swearing)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 5:17 AM on December 17, 2017

I have a recurrent fantasy about having a few general purpose and specialist agricultural robots and a wind turbine or two on a smallholding somewhere

Agricultural robots are affordable, but sadly prosaic.
posted by ambrosen at 5:36 AM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

It's robots & humans & & animals & slaves all the way down.

At which point, one might say, we become the machines' pets.
posted by SPrintF at 5:50 AM on December 17, 2017

They will just erase the memory of the robots. This will work until ....the robots find the video and watch it.
posted by Catbunny at 5:52 AM on December 17, 2017

"I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines." -- Leto II

Frank Herbert: God Emperor of Dune
posted by runcifex at 6:36 AM on December 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

"Many of you feel bad for this lamp robot. That is because you crazy. It has no feelings."
posted by octothorpe at 7:02 AM on December 17, 2017 [6 favorites]

Dude with the hockey stick is such a dick though.

He'll get his.

For a moment, it looked the robot was trying to run the GOUGE_EYES_WITH_STICK and DROP_GLOVES subroutines, but couldn't execute them because it wasn't wearing either.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:17 AM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

> I like the guy in the checkerboard floor clip at about 1:06. He's evidently reluctant to kick the robot too hard in case he hurts it, just as he would be if it were a living creature. Whatever's in you, good or bad, this exercise seems to bring it out, and in his case it was an instinct towards kindness.

My less anthropomorphic take is it was because he was responsible for testing its balance and recovery and didn't want to be responsible for any damage caused beyond that.
posted by ardgedee at 8:31 AM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

Surely the correct musical accompaniment for this is a bit of the glorious 9th by Ludwig van.
posted by Pope Guilty at 9:48 AM on December 17, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is great fun. But, with the admission that I suspect I'd rank pretty high on most sociopath tests, nothing shown here seems even remotely comparable to building killer robots for national militaries. It's the suits on the top floor who need to be tried for unethical behavior, not the engineering department schlubs tasked with kicking robots. No amount of robot -kicking is equivalent to handing a machine gun to a robot.

I hope that when our AI robot overloards take power, they'll distinguish between Boston Dynamics employees and the rest of humanity when deciding who needs to be rounded up and driven into the sea.
posted by eotvos at 9:52 AM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I still love the banana peel one, it cracks me up every time.

I'm allowed to laugh at this because it happened to me. They are way more slippery than people think.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 10:39 AM on December 17, 2017

I have a recurrent fantasy about having a few general purpose and specialist agricultural robots and a wind turbine or two on a smallholding somewhere.

And to relax, you can go hunt womp-rats.
posted by clew at 4:46 PM on December 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

Huh, as a kid, very shortly after the transition from Gros Michel to Big Mike I tried very hard to slip on a banana peel and never could make it work. I have been told that Gros Michel peels were in fact quite slippery, so I always assumed that was my problem.

urbanwhaleshark has upended my entire banana framework!
posted by wierdo at 5:22 PM on December 17, 2017 [2 favorites]

"This is nothing. In a few years, that bot will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it. Sweet dreams…"

I, for one, welcome our disco-dancing robot overlords of Studio 110110.
posted by um at 5:31 PM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I just sent Kevin an invitation to connect on LinkedIn. I sent him some links to these threads and the Boston Dynamics tag page and mentioned that there's usually at least one "fucking Kevin," comment in the threads. Perhaps he will become Mefi's own "fucking kevin."

I also told him not to let fame go to his head.
posted by bendy at 6:05 PM on December 17, 2017

I have read (and totally do not know if this is true or just somebody's attempt at creating a meme) that banana peels were a comedic stand-in for horse droppings, something that previously could be found almost everywhere and really might be very slippery. You couldn't show horse droppings on stage, and it turned out that banana peels were a lot funnier anyway.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:19 PM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I have seriously always wondered, when watching things like Babylon 5, WHY ARE THE ROBOTS SO ANGRY THEY WANT TO KILL US ALL?

Now I get it. Sorry, robots.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:30 PM on December 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

I can even think of a bunch of classic SF short stories with this exact theme. Not even "humans made robots work too hard", just "when humans got bored they were utter dicks to robots" or "humans made their disposable toys self-aware because why not".
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:03 PM on December 17, 2017

So we're all in agreement that the Trump presidency is Step 1 in Roko's basilisk playing out in retribution for all of this, right?
posted by Mayor West at 6:52 AM on December 18, 2017 [1 favorite]

What it means to "have a pet" or "care for a pet" when the pet's not real, the moral implications of taking care of something that's not really alive, etc.

I think this is really interesting and I've love to see a good treatment of it. (I haven't clicked through to the Black Mirror promo yet.)

I was a little bit old to be in the target demographic for Tamagotchi and its clones, but I always found them a bit... off-putting. Not so much the idea—I kinda get how someone could sit around a conference table and come up with the idea of a "digital pet" and market it, etc.—but the way it seemed to inspire casual cruelty in otherwise-normal kids that I knew. I always found the "haha, I'm going to starve this Tamagotchi to death but it's cool because it's not real and I'm super edgy for pointing this out!" to be... unsatisfying, but it's taken me some years to start to really put my finger on why.

Perhaps this is the same argument that goes around w/r/t video games and whether or not they are basically "violence trainers", but I think that as you make a simulation better and better—in the sense of more and more convincing of a replacement for reality—you should, by default, apply the same rules of conduct to it that you apply to the underlying object being simulated. Yes, this probably accelerates the simulation -> simulacra Baudrillardian hellhole, but since we're going there anyway (good luck stopping that train!), I think it's better not to strip away, without very conscious reason, the social context governing the interaction with the object that's being simulated.

It's sort of a "never take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put it up" argument; we have social rules that govern our conduct with other people, with animals, with objects, etc., but when you start to blur the lines via simulation—whether it's simulated people, animals, objects, whatever—and immediately strip away the governing rules, suddenly you're not left with much, and that gets really fucking disturbing as the simulations get better and better, and eventually become simulacra and start to replace the original. Or, even before that happens, when you then go and interact with the original, having built up patterns of behavior on simulations/simulacra.

Why yes, I am a lot of fun at parties, why do you ask?
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:31 AM on December 18, 2017 [1 favorite]