Philadelphia Hackers and Others Offer Brotherly Love To Fallen Robot

An anonymous reader writes: Since a hitchhiking robot was destroyed in Philadelphia over the weekend, there has been an overwhelming show of support according to its co-creators Frauke Zeller and David Smith. Makers from all over Philly have reached out and offered to help rebuild the robot. "We'll say that at this moment, if we get the OK from the creators to repair or replace the needed parts for HitchBOT, we'll be happy to do so," wrote Georgia Guthrie, executive director for a local makerspace called The Hacktory. "If not, we understand and we may just build ourselves a HitchBot2 to send along on its journey. We feel it's the least we can do to let everyone, especially the Robot community, know that Philly isn't so bad."

Comments

American Cities

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are American cities such rotten, dangerous hellholes? In Europe, (well Western Europe), nothing would have happened to this robot and the people would have simply have been amused by it.

I really don't understand USA. Is the government of these cities so poor?

Re:American Cities

[Lord Bitman]

The robot will *always* have been vandalised. That is the only end condition. It is a social experiment, to see if the robot gets vandalised, which runs until it happens. The experiment can be viewed as:

while !robot.IsVandalised() {
  if robot.NeedsRepair() {
    community.Repair(robot)
  } // do nothing
}
community.ExpressOutrageAtHumanity()

This only proves "at least one person will vandalise a (reports indicate already-broken) robot". We already knew that.

Re:American Cities

[afeeney]

Of course, western Europeans never vandalize. Especially not things of special interest or value.

Thug culture is to blame.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the United States, there is something called "thug culture". It glorifies things like not getting any sort of a useful education, not getting a legitimate job, joining gangs, engaging in violence, engaging in the abuse and peddling of drugs, engaging in the abusive use of guns, committing theft, committing robbery, committing murder, and so forth. Rap music is one of the main ways that this culture is glorified and promoted in the media.

This is the kind of culture that resulted in the destruction of this robot. It's also the kind of culture that results in its participants attacking police officers, then getting shot by these officers when they have to defend themselves from violence.

The worst part, though, is that many Americans refuse to acknowledge (although they do know it to be true) that this is a rotten, degenerate culture. In fact, they blame everybody but the thugs for the situation that the thugs are in! According to these apologists, it isn't the thugs' faults that they totally rejected all of the free education provided to them and refuse to participate in legitimate society. And according to them the police should just stand there and allow these thugs to violently attack them. As long as these apologists keep on defending what really is an indefensibly terrible culture, we'll keep seeing incidents like this where police are maliciously attacked, and things like this travelling robot are unnecessarily destroyed.

Re:Thug culture is to blame.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, "freedom" is a legal right.
Outside US, "freedom" is a moral right.
The difference is that outside US, people don't defend being a dick by claiming "freedom".

Re:Thug culture is to blame.

[drinkypoo]

Literally everything you said is the moral standards of the ruling class except for 'drugs' read 'pharmaceuticals', for 'robbery' read 'arbitrage', and well, I guess nothing else need be changed.

Now, now, that's not true at all! The rich don't usually do their own dirty work. They drive other people into poverty, and then have them do it in order to try to survive. That way, they can keep the blood off of their own suit.

I don't think it should be fixed!

[DarkOx]

Hitchbot has a technology component yes, but its hardly state of the art anything, except maybe in 'art' were we might call it avant garde.

Hitchbot if anything was a work of performance or installation art and the show is over. It traveled a lot of miles elicited a lot of responses, many very positive, some negative and finally one vicious and destructive. That is its story. It the work of its creators and we should of course respect their wishes for the project but I think we gain more insight in considering the run it had rather than extending it forever.

Hitchbot is something that can be put back together, but this world is full of things that can't. Even rebuilding / recreating hitchbot won't reproduce the creative moment when some person had the idea to make a hitch hiking robot.

Re:It will never work

[PPH]

This is true. But then I'd expect that 99.44% to just drive by and leave it alone. And HitchBOT isn't like my friend's Bentley that keeps getting keyed because, "Rich people suck".

Ths was a demonstration of pure sociopathy. And I'm surprised that law enforcement doesn't set up occasional stings to catch this kind of behavior. The resulting penalty doesn't have to be much. But get these people 'on the books' so that when they apply for a weapons permit or a license as a teacher, there is a red flag on their record.