Pretty weird & unsettling...

[Lean'n'mean]

and the robot abuse part is strangely disturbing............................."in this world or the next, they will have their revenge."

 

[Bolero]

and the robot abuse part is strangely disturbing............................."in this world or the next, they will have their revenge."

I love it....and a Lawsuit should follow...

 

[philosophygirl78]

It is sad how alone humans feel in the universe that we must satisfy our need for understanding life by way of creating a new race....

 

[sheeplady]

I know it is a machine, but I felt really bad for that robot.

This has to be some sort of a social experiment, right?

 

[GHT]

Can I have it's left hip joint please?

 

[LizzieMaine]

What gets me is that so many of these videos are not so much parodying the robot as they are parodying the notion of compassion. Who really *is* the soulless empty construct here?

 

[philosophygirl78]

What gets me is that so many of these videos are not so much parodying the robot as they are parodying the notion of compassion. Who really *is* the soulless empty construct here?

The creator, it would seem...

 

[Fading Fast]

Without knowing more, I felt bad for the robot as the hockey stick stuff seemed bullying or toying rather than testing to see how the robot would respond to real challenges it might face. As Sheeplady said, it feels like some cooked up social test to measure the viewers' response. Well mine is I can intellectually understand that a robot doesn't have feelings, but if you create one that looks like a human in ways and then abuse it, I will feel sad and angry. Great, what did that prove?

 

[HudsonHawk]

I guess I'm missing all the psychological aspects. I saw a demonstration of how the robot can react to changes while performing a task and how he/she/it can self-correct in a non-demonstrative environment. IMO, that anyone saw it as "bullying" or that the robot may have an emotional response is more telling about the viewer than any intent on the creator. And I've seen Blade Runner more times than I can count.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was thinking more about all the smartass "Robot Lives Matter" memes and comments and such. Ha ha, look, it's snarkier than thou college-boy irony. How witty and original and provocative they think they are. The joke tells more about the one telling it.

 

[Fading Fast]

I was thinking more about all the smartass "Robot Lives Matter" memes and comments and such. Ha ha, look, it's snarkier than thou college-boy irony. How witty and original and provocative they think they are. The joke tells more about the one telling it.

If this is what it was about - agree completely. To HH points, it felt a bit like a test like you described and, if so, I agree with your comments, but there was something in the tone and approach that felt snarky and like Lizzie is describing.

 

[sheeplady]

I guess I'm missing all the psychological aspects. I saw a demonstration of how the robot can react to changes while performing a task and how he/she/it can self-correct in a non-demonstrative environment. IMO, that anyone saw it as "bullying" or that the robot may have an emotional response is more telling about the viewer than any intent on the creator. And I've seen Blade Runner more times than I can count.

Having an emotional response to things that are inanimate is part of the human condition.

How many times here do people feel sad or angry when something historic is destroyed or muddled up- even if we have no true emotional connection to it. I feel bad when historic buildings are razed- even building I have never put a foot in during my life.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Having an emotional response to things that are inanimate is part of the human condition.

How many times here do people feel sad or angry when something historic is destroyed or muddled up- even if we have no true emotional connection to it. I feel bad when historic buildings are razed- even building I have never put a foot in during my life.

I understand being emotional about losing a historic building too. But not because I think the building's feelings are hurt.

I just think the point of the video was to demonstrate how the robot corrects itself when the package is knocked away, that it senses it's no longer holding the package and compensates by picking it back up. I don't think that's to inflict psychological damage on either the robot or the observer, it's simply to simulate and test a possible real world condition.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

I certainly agree HH. Feeling sorry for a machine is a bit over the top. However, I once did feel kind of sorry for my buddie's new 427 67 Vette that he wiped out about 20' of fence with just showing off.

 

[vitanola]

Remember, too that this research is largely funded by DARPA. How much would would be hurt the feelings of, say, a soldier who was in this manner thwarted. The folks at Boston Dynamics do have a sense of humor, though:

 

[sheeplady]

I understand being emotional about losing a historic building too. But not because I think the building's feelings are hurt.

I just think the point of the video was to demonstrate how the robot corrects itself when the package is knocked away, that it senses it's no longer holding the package and compensates by picking it back up. I don't think that's to inflict psychological damage on either the robot or the observer, it's simply to simulate and test a possible real world condition.

I don't think anyone here thinks the robot has feelings. As humans we're conditioned to respond to large host of illogical situations.

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.

Several of us have had an emotional reaction (by which I mean any sort of reaction other than "wow, that robot picked up that package! Neat!" reaction). 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?

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've always found the kind of people -- and I've known a few -- who obsess over building robots and such to not be especially well-developed on the empathy scale. Not so much dumb as either completely oblivious to such things, or, more destructively, buying into the Spockish notion that emotion is a weakness to be suppressed. Hence the snide mockery in the various videos going around of the idea of compassion -- the kind of thing you can expect from the kind of people who have been taught to fetishize the "logical" and the "rational", and that emotion is something fit only for ridicule.

I guess that's what happens when you don't get outside much.

As for me, I felt bad when I saw my rusted-out old Toyota waiting to be hauled off to the scrapyard to be gutted and crushed. Won't be long before it'll be my turn.

 

[vitanola]

I don't think anyone here thinks the robot has feelings. As humans we're conditioned to respond to large host of illogical situations.

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.

Several of us have had an emotional reaction (by which I mean any sort of reaction other than "wow, that robot picked up that package! Neat!" reaction). 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?

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.

I see what the folks at Boston Dynamics were trying to do tp with the film, and agree that the hockey stick shenanigans rather diluted the point. Frankly the thing was just a really neat machine until it was interfered with, at which point every viewer who had ever in their life been teased immediately IDENTIFIED with the machine.

Mis Maine, you wrote: "the kind of thing you can expect from the kind of people who have been taught to fetishize the "logical" and the "rational", and that emotion is something fit only for ridicule..." Now that might be the case, but it might also, I think, be the case that a person who was trained to solve mechanical problems would upon watching this film see first a fascinating and difficult problem solved, and be so interested in this solution that he (almost definitely a "he") didn't think of anything else. On the other hand a person who was not at all familiar with these devices would have a tendency to anthropomorphize the machine and read the actions of the tester as cruel, or at the very least disquieting.

Then we have the very form of the machine, which is entirely too similar to the shape of a human for entire comfort. Actually, all of these animal shaped machines have something of the uncanny about them.

 

[Stearmen]

With all the emotions going wild, you all missed one of the most remarkable things in the film! Notice how the robot stumbles several times but always recovers, much like a one year old child. Just a couple of years ago, when a robot stumbled just once, game over, like a child taking their very first steps. Not sure whether to be amazed or terrified!

 

[Lean'n'mean]

I think why many have an emotional response to the 'bullying' is because we know there are real people in the world that are treated like that & by people who have as much empathy as the nerd doing the bullying. It's interesting that such a demonstration needed to be so violent, maybe that demonstrates more about human nature than it does about the robot's capacities.
The robot it's self is truely remarkable, the way it rectifies it's self when slipping in the snow is unnerving, more human than human, it reminded me of an inebriated gent on his way home from the pub.. seeing it stack boxes was very alarming, you could see hundreds of thousands of warehouse & supermarket jobs disappearing.
It was scary when it got up after being knocked down, it looked ready to fight back.
As it walked out the door at the end you could just imagine it saying "I'm outta here, I don't have to take this crap " or better still "I'll be back"