Science
Published on 1 January 2021 |
by Steve Hanley
1 January 2021 by Steve Hanley
The fusion between robots and humans takes place, albeit slowly. Science fiction writers like Issac Asimov and have been creating novels about it since the 1950s. TV shows like Black Mirror and Humans explore the darkness that can exist on the other side of the human / robot interface. Films like I, Robot, starring Will Smith, and based on the book of the same name by Asimov, focus on the moral and ethical mysteries that will emerge as robots become more sophisticated. What if machines with advanced artificial intelligence turned out to be smarter than humans? It’s reminiscent of the lyrics of Sting’s Brass Around Your Finger: ‘I will turn your face to a marble, when you see that your servant is your master.’
The people at Boston Dynamics – founded by Alphabet – have been printing the robotics and AI envelope for years. Alphabet sold the company to SoftBank, which resold it to Hyundai in 2020. Despite the change in ownership, the company continued its talents in several videos. Beginning in October 2018, it introduces a mechanical dog named Spotdancing to Uptown Funk, sung by Bruno Mars, and a humanoid robot named Atlas who runs and jumps over obstacles. A working dog may not be high on your list of things to wish for, but Atlas can play a useful role in the real world – for example, combating burning buildings to save people, or fighting warriors on the battlefield. to replace. The videos of 2018 are shown below.
Two years later, Atlas developed further and got a twin brother. The latest video from Boston Dynamics features some Atlas robots digging with Spot The Wonder Dog to the 1962 top hit Do You Love Me? sung by The Contours, a Motown miracle band, one hit.
Some watch the latest video and quarrel: ‘Yes, it’s a dancing robot. It only manages programs written by humans. Big story. “But people may be missing the bigger picture. By 2021, robots and AI will become more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence has already advanced to the point where it can write its own programming. A dancing dog might just be a novelty or it can be a harbinger of future things – a brave new world, so to speak, in which machines adapt better to a warmer planet than humans do.
While we are celebrating our ingenuity to build robots that can dance, we may be ignoring the evidence that our time on earth is rapidly coming to an end. Literature and popular culture assume that people will always win at impossible odds, but this may be the best science fiction. When the next species that inhabits the earth arrives a few millennia when the earth cools down again, the only record of human existence within the digital ways of the robots like Atlas that we create in our image may be.
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About the author
Steve Hanley Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his homes in Florida and Connecticut or wherever the Singularity can lead him. You can follow him Twitter but not on social media platforms run by evil lords like Facebook.