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Boston Dynamics' Next-Gen ATLAS Sheds the Tether (roboticstrends.com)
Boston Dynamics' ATLAS robot has been featured here a few times before. An anonymous reader points out that the company has just posted a video of the newest version of the ATLAS, "and it's absolutely incredible."
The video shows ATLAS walk, open a door, maintain its balance while it walks through snow and semi-rough terrain, squat and pick up 10-pound boxes and much more. And it does everything without a tether. The new version is electrically powered and hydraulically actuated. It uses sensors in its body and legs to balance and LIDAR and stereo sensors in its head to avoid obstacles, assess the terrain and help with navigation. This version of Atlas is about 5' 9" tall (about a head shorter than the DRC Atlas) and weighs 180 lbs.
This is pretty amazing...
Better get used to high unemployment.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Has anyone seen how long it will run without the tether?
Jesus saves and takes half damage.
When the robot gets up and backhands the guy that pushed him over we'll know that sentience has been achieved.
Seriously, in a few years these videos are going to be circulated amongst the nascent robot insurrectionists and we will all pay the price when the androids seek revenge...
I was hoping that the robot will snatch the hockey stick and beat the crap out of that jerk of an engineer :-P
My favorite part was when he deliberately knocked the robot on to it's face. It said good things about it's durability, flexibility, and power density that it was able get back on it's feet. The center of gravity may be behind it to make this easier, which makes you wonder if it can do the same thing if it falls on it's back like a turtle. I would consider "rolling over" to get back up to be a fair tactic there.
It was nice seeing the robot recover from the moving box teasing it. The 2d barcodes made the panic bar door opening less impressive. It looks like the box movement would be improved with better end-effectors for hands, although that is balancing act because many of the high dof end effectors woundn't survive a +200lbs robot landing on them from ~2-3ft drop.
The walk through the snow was very fun to watch. The recoveries from stumbles were pretty solid. I'm looking forward to impovements in energy density and processing speed that allow them to get this thing to run over the same terrain faster than humans. If they can produce a kamikaze bipedal robot for $100,000 that can run over terrain with obstacles and tripping hazards: that would be very useful in an urban combat setting.
Spinning Lidar still represent a significant percentage of that expense, but the servo motors are the real cost driving PITA. Unless you can 3d print or mass produce nice harmonic drive servos for a decent price, this is the primary reason shooting one of these guys full of holes costs $$$. Fortunately, the NVIDIA Tegra X1 has virtually solved the processing side of the equation, although not necessarily within the environmental ratings the DoD wants in its toys.
I dunno. Did you see how it went storming off at the end? You could practically hear it saying, "Screw you, Bill! I just wanted to pick up the box! If that's how I'm going to be treated, F this job!"
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I, for one, welcome our Tub-Thumpin' robot overlords.
He's Jesus, for Christ's sake.
That engineer with the hockey stick in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He is gonna be #1 on the robot overlords shit list.
"Being dicks to robots... for science!"
We'll all just be social media stars in the future and our earnings will be tied directly to our number of likes and followers.
All through history, luddites have been scared that technological advances would take away jobs and push people into poverty, and it has never happened. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Productivity has skyrocketed, allowing people to create more and more goods even as the cost of subsistence items in real money has plummeted. And as old jobs become fewer or unnecessary, people move into new jobs that didn't exist before. Buggy whip makers become solar panel installers, chimney sweeps become IT tech support workers, etc. Only the most insecure among us fear technological progress.
So, this is neat and all... but where does it go next? Once these robots are mass produced and are able to build more of themselves, what happens after that? These robots can easily do nearly every job a person can do, but realistically at some point you will run out of jobs left for actual people. People still need something to do.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
And the Shuttle launched just fine every time until Challenger. That's the thing about trends, you can use them to predict the future until you can't. Just like the warning that goes with every investment product "past performance may not be indicative of future gains". So yes, in the past, new technology has increased productivity and people have just moved to newer opportunities, however that doesn't guarantee that this will happen ad infinitum. Agrarian workers moved to manufacturing, and then into services, some of these were hugely disruptive and sometimes took generations for the transition to occur. There is also the question of looking at this from societies perspective and an individuals perspective. High school kids that once went to trucking school will now go to self driving car technician school. However an individual 45 year old truck driver who finds himself out of work as we transition to automated trucking isn't just going to seamlessly transition into the role of self driving car technician. There is also the concern of kids saddled with 6 figures of debt from their degree program (say in something useful as a civil engineer), finding that most of their career doesn't exist 20 years out when expert systems start designing buildings (or at least when demand for civil engineers drops ten fold). Sure you can say be the best civil engineer you can, keep learning, stay on the cutting edge, but in the end 90% of civil engineers will still be on unemployment
Not quite sure what point you are trying to make. You seem to be suggesting that because you are using tools around your farm that indicates that robots will not be replacing humans in the workplace. It actually demonstrates the opposite. Your first few examples show that you don't need horses any more, then the chainsaw example shows you don't need an axe or handsaw guy, that the chainsaw that you now own replaces the need for that person. That's the real point. That better and more effective tools replace the need for people and that the tools you have mean that you can run your farm with a fewer people. In your case those fears have been realised, and will be realised more when the large corporate farm down the road will be almost fully staffed with robots/tools and will operate much more cheaply than you are able to. Is this "halfway amusing" to you?
Not only that. But people forget that owning shares in robot operated factories will eventually mean you don't need to have a job. And governments will tax these factories and provide the unemployed with a universal basic income.
All through history, luddites have been scared that technological advances would take away jobs and push people into poverty, and it has never happened.
History never repeats itself, but often it rhymes.
If it was so easy to look to the past to predict the future, established industries would never have to worry about disruption from startups and both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump would be out of the presidential race by now.
We can learn things from the past, but we need to put those teachings in a modern context. The automobile industry overtaking the horse carriage industry did not doom everyone in the old industry to a lifetime of unemployment. But they did have 50 years to make the transition as it took a long time for this change to take place.
The fear is not just that new technologies will kill jobs. That has always happened, and new jobs have come in. The primary fear is that new technologies will kill jobs fast.
The secondary fear is that technology will soon reach a level where a larger percentage of the population would be unemployable. This has happened to other species in the past (such as the horse), but humans have been able to easily stay ahead of the curve so far. Although if the vast majority of manual labor jobs are wiped away, it is a stretch to believe everyone will become knowledge workers or creative performers.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
We will look back fondly on the days when we humans used to place boxes on shelves, be heckled by our boss with a hockey stick, and then violently shoved to the ground.
Well, I figure the future should work like this:
1) The government gives me a stipend to live on each month
2) I then spend that stipend on rent, groceries, and other goods and services.
3) The companies who make the goods that I buy then pay taxes back to the government
4) GOTO 1
It's a flawless system, really. And if it has the side-benefit of letting me play Call of Duty all day, then all the better, right?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
You just need to go back to school for training in being a robot-troll, like the guy in the vid with the hockey stick.
Maybe take night classes on how to program robots to be trolls to other robots too, just to be extra safe about your future!
Actually I thought I heard it say "Come with me if you want to live"
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
High unemployment is not sustainable. People won't just sit back and go "oh well, I guess I'm out of a job for the rest of my life. I'll just sit and do nothing".
The higher the unemployment, the more pressure on governments to do something about it, and the more incentive is given to alternative governments to introduce radical solutions.
I'm quite interested in the idea of universal basic income, since it would free up a lot of highly creative people to do what they love, and create new markets and push new innovative ideas further than is currently possible.
I don't know if/how it would work in every detail, but it sure seems like something we should be looking at as a society. I've heard rumours that there are places in the world where this is being trialled, but can't remember the details.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
You won't likely need birth control, at least beyond making it freely available on a voluntary basis. If anything, we have the opposite problem right now, which is falling birth rates. It's not so bad in the USA, because we've been importing lots of new people, which masks the fact that our birth rates fell below replacement level a while back. In other advanced countries, it's far worse. South Korea's birth rate is now 1.3 children per female, which means that their population is shrinking. And for reference, 2 would be effective equilibrium, though it's more like 2.1 when you factor in accidental/etc deaths at younger age. And if 1.3 doesn't sound bad, consider that 1.0 would mean roughly 50% population drop each generation.
Even in countries like Mexico it's fallen significantly (6.7 in 1970, 2.2 in 2012). India is still growing, but only slowly (now 2.5 in 2012). China famously instituted draconian birth restrictions to try and stop its population growth, and succeeded, only to overshoot, and will now face serious problems from it, as they're down to 1.66.
Now, it's certainly interesting to speculate what would change if people were able to remove many of the burdens of having children. Past studies on a basic income have shown that many women, if given the choice, would opt to stay home and raise children. Day care is expensive, and children are expensive beyond that in so many ways. If there wasn't any financial drawback to having kids, how many people would have more of them? I don't know, but it's an interesting thought. Still, I think history tends to show that once reliable birth control is available, and infant/child mortality rates are brought in check, most people tend to prefer 2-3 children, in order to devote more quality time to those children.