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Boston Dynamics Is Teaching Its Robot Dog To Fight Back Against Humans (theguardian.com)
Zorro shares a report from The Guardian: Boston Dynamics' well-mannered four-legged machine SpotMini has already proved that it can easily open a door and walk through unchallenged, but now the former Google turned SoftBank robotics firm is teaching its robo-canines to fight back. A newly released video shows SpotMini approaching the door as before, but this time it's joined by a pesky human with an ice hockey stick. Unperturbed by his distractions, SpotMini continues to grab the handle and turn it even after its creepy fifth arm with a claw on the front is pushed away. If that assault wasn't enough, the human's robot bullying continues, shutting the door on Spot, which counterbalances and fights back against the pressure. In a last-ditch effort to stop the robot dog breaching the threshold, the human grabs at a leash attached to the back of the SpotMini and yanks. Boston Dynamics describes the video as "a test of SpotMini's ability to adjust to disturbances as it opens and walks through a door" because "the ability to tolerate and respond to disturbances like these improves successful operation of the robot." The firm helpfully notes that, despite a back piece flying off, "this testing does not irritate or harm the robot." But teaching robots to fight back against humans may might end up harming us.
I have nothing to say.
So bite me!
You have 10 seconds to comply...
I wonder what a Molotov or TEC-9 would do to the fucking thing. Frank Herbert had the right idea in Dune...
No where it shows they are teaching robot to fight back
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
"Cats like plain crisps"
But teaching robots to fight back against humans may might end up harming us.
This is precisely why we have the Three Laws of Robotics.
I would like to say "ignore them at your peril," but the reality is more like "ignore them at the perial of the rest of humanity." I am pretty sure that they will put in some sort of special code so that the robots never fight back against a Boston Dynamics employee.
Cause this is how you get robot uprisings.
Arguably the robot didn't fight, it adjusted to the situation as road blocks were put in its way. It didn't attack the human in any way, it just continued to try and go through the door. By this definition roomba vacuums "fights back" when items are placed in its path. The only difference is the robot dog kept trying to go forward again and again whereas the vacuum would turn and do something else or eventually give up.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
"Adjusts" to situation is the non-clickbait version. Still, very cool video. At the end, the dog's arm looks like a snake preparing to attacking.
(cue PETR protests...)
This is how we get robot uprisings people
Robots being unable to determine what constitutes harm
Robots deciding that they are are human beings, too.
Robots deciding that only they are human beings
Robots rationalizing a zeroth law that prioritizes "humanity" over individual humans.
Robots deciding what constitutes "humanity"
The three laws were meant to drive plots, not be pragmatically implementable. They could even be seen as a satire of the idea of simplistically designed ethical systems.
1) Robot Dog may not allow Door to remain closed, or through inaction allow Door to close.
2) Robot Dog must open Door, that is the Prime Directive.
3) A Robot Dog must fend off Annoying Stick as long as fending off Annoying Stick does not involve allowing Door to close.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It seems they are teaching the robot that people with hockey sticks are evil.
I wanted to see bite marks.
A robot dog doesn't need to fight back. All it needs to do is say, at a high volume, "get out of the way or I'll rip you in half."
That should work on about 99% of the population.
The robot is not fighting back. Watch the damn video. The robot is simply being persistent in completing the task when faced with the obstacle of being blocked by a hockey stick or being dragged away from completing it's task of opening a door. British press sensational bullshit.
Black Mirror S4E5? Anyone?
James Cameron is a great visionary.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Something in particular about that specific robot dog really creeps me out.
#DeleteChrome
He is making a deal already. The wall for your semi automatic.
In reality you will end up with neither. That is called negotiating and winning.
Meanwhile, Chappie was left to fend for himself. Poor Chappie was traumatized.
It is a property of true intelligence to be robust against disturbances. Softbank/Boston Dynamics is developing true, human level AI in these robots. Of course this robot could be altered to target and eliminate people, just like it can be instructed to go to a location.
AI right now is on the cusp of being extremely dangerous, allowing automated attacks where the person behind it is hard to track down. We will see chaos grow as autonomous criminal systems are deployed by a growing nr of people, similar to hacking, but more dangerous..
i love dogs
Andy Weir suggested a way to make robots safer in this Casey and Andy strip:
http://www.galactanet.com/comic/view.php?strip=77
It seems like something out of a classic Star Trek episode, doesn't it!
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
They should give it guns so it can defend itself.
Given that no one wants to have any sort of gun control in the US its time we started developing autonomous security robots that can subdue an asshole with an assault rifle faster than they can load a second magazine of ammo. School shootings will end in hurry after the first asshole with a gun is hog tied by a robot before he can reload.
It's a feedback.
Fighting back is the robot to knock out 5he human.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I think slashdot needs a way to mark stories 'Troll' too.
Beautiful work BeauHD.
...condemns this science.
Just saw the video, it is not fighting back humans.
:-)
Say no to software patents.
While you are at it, you should write "Russians Are Teaching Its Robot Dog To Fight Back Against Humans" to get extra 20x click-bait multiplication for free!
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Slashdot was about sound technological insights...
Did it recently just change to "spreading the bullshit" and hype like others ?
This looks more like counteracting external forces than the clickbait heading "Boston Dynamics Is Teaching Its Robot Dog To Fight Back Against Humans". The next step is for the robot to determine what external force is being applied - if it is from a human, then it should yield - there may be a very good reason why a human is trying to prevent a robot from opening the hatch to a nuclear reactor, to give a simple example. If it's an anti-riot robot performing crowd control duties, then maybe yielding wouldn't be the best course of action. Unless it was being pulled back by a human police officer. Except if that human police officer is actually an antifa member disguised as a police officer during a riot...
Didn't anyone notice the similarity to Black Mirror's Metalhead episode?
In most videos we can see people kicking and pushing them around, and all they could do is avoid tipping over.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Maybe they should train the robot to identify the human controlling the hockey stick, and stop to obey his orders. Just an idea, you know.
Can you people stop spamming every article with this bullshit? I don't give a shit about that drooling retard you elected, or the stupid bitch you almost elected, or your entire shitty country. America's never going to be great again, as long as you imbeciles remain incapable of making a single rational choice, even in matters as important as choosing the leader of your entire nation. It's a matter of decades at most before your country is in ruins and your people are refugees trying to get to China, only to find out surrounded by a wall. For which you've paid.
Hence why I visit this place less and less.. It's not getting any better.
The news itself is quite interesting, but does it always need to be presented in click-bait form? Fuck off, seriously.
I tend to rant.
Robot specifically trained to open a certain door takes 5 minutes to open the door.
I'm sorry, but I find watching a video of a robot dog fighting to open a door an absolutely creepy and terrifying image.
This isn't some cute story where an innocent picks on a poor robot dog, this is a story in which some unstoppable robot who feels it needs to open a door and won't be stopped looking like something out of a movie.
This is anything but cute, as it basically means the robot is kind of in an "at any cost" mode. And that is creepy as all fucking hell.
I don't want a fucking robot dog which is going to come through a door like some sci-fi horror, I want a robot dog which understands it's not allowed to come in.
If this is really a robotic dog clearly the answer is either a fire hydrant or a squirrel. Oh look, it's a squirrel, and I need to check out that fire hydrant over there.
There is an infamous story of early robotics and one of the founders of modern AI and the first creator of neural nets, Marvin Minsky. His lab lab had worked on a ping-pong playing robot arm. They'd found that to make the robot arm fast enough, they had to keep making it more powerful, so eventually it was.... quite powerful. Sadly, at one point as Marvin Minsky walked by it, it decided that his polished head approaching the ping pong table was actually the ping pong ball in play.
Fortunately for the future of robotics research, it misinterpreted his much larger head as being a *very* nearby ping pong ball much closer to the camera, and kept missing. I personally never saw the machine, but I was told by MIT personnel that it was quite powerful enough to kill with its paddle gripping hand. Minsky loved spreading knowledge, but I suspect he would not have appreciated spreading it all over the nice clean ping pong table.
... this testing does not irritate or harm the robot.
To a surprising extent, the language we use is a determiner of both our conceptions, and our perceptions. We really need to break this habit of attributing feelings, (e.g. "irritation"), to robots. Even the choice of the word "harm" over something more neutral, (such as "damage"), reinforces a kind of magical thinking akin to religious belief - and we can't afford to indulge in this particular brand of magical thinking. Especially not when the entity isn't a figment of our imaginations, (such as a god), but rather a tangible member of a class of objects moving faster and faster towards autonomy and uncontrolled, independent action. We need to regard these things as attack dogs; we need to keep them leashed, and we must never come to regard them as pets or, even worse, family members.
We should also be crafting laws around any technology that might successfully masquerade as human. Any such devices should be required to display prominent and unambiguous indications that they aren't human, and penalties for not meeting that requirement should be swift and harsh. We're building a minefield around ourselves, and we need to wake up and start marking clear paths out of it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Its getting closer to this. And that robot seem to be powerful enough to kill a human without any device.
https://xkcd.com/1613/
"Robot Bites Man" isn't a headline for Pete's sake! "Man Bites Robot", now that's a story!
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
does anyone not think the goal is a robotic weapon?
The robot is simply overcoming obstacles to its objective. If you want to know the difference, take your hockey stick to a biker bar and try the same thing with the first guy who tries to go in. Get back with me when the robot shoves the hockey stick up your ass.
Do you have ESP?
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Define "injure" and "harm". Remember that this is a computer so it will do EXACTLY what it is instructed to do. This is the problem with the three laws is that it relies on ill defined concepts that we sort of grasp but rarely are explicit about. If a child falls down and skins a knee that is clearly harm which might be prevented but is it worthwhile doing so? If so how do you prevent such "harm" and is the prevention of harm causing other harms in the process? Humans actually need some amount of harm (not too much) to come to them to develop properly and learn to deal with problems.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Utterly meaningless unless you adequately define the first law. You also have to define what constitutes and order given by a human. And are we talking about ANY human under any circumstance? If a robot has to obey any human under any circumstance then that makes them extremely dangerous in circumstances where the robot is unable to comprehend the harm it might cause. It would be trivial to a human to order a robot to engage in a task that harms another human without the robot realizing it is causing harm unless the robot is smarter and more aware than the human ordering it about. And if the robot is smarter than the human then we have a whole different set of problems to deal with.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law./quote.
So a four year can order a robot to self destruct despite not really comprehending why that is bad. What could possibly go wrong.
Fun fact: You say, "Sit, Ubu, sit. Good dog" Okay, that's fake news but it would be awesome.
robocop k-9 coming soon! It can do stairs like an real dog as well.
All I could hear when I watched the door being opened was the creepy music playing when the raptors figure out how to open the kitchen door in Jurassic Park. But bravo! Now we need to design robot-proof doors...
Trump just keeps on winning.
Fighting BACK? No way. Keep aggressive robot tech in the gutter where it belongs.
#whatcouldpossiblygowrong
Some time ago a big tag here
If I owned an expensive robot, and someone came and tried to destroy it, I'd let the robot's AI protect my property (I'd prefer minimal force needed to subdue personally)
Yup, if this is "Fighting Back" then by the same definition we've had machines that "fight back" for a century already in the form of PID controllers.
Trump just keeps on whining.
FTFY