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Science
Published on January 1, 2021 |
by Steve Hanley
January 1, 2021 by Steve hanley
Convergence between robots and humans is happening, 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. Movies like I, Robot, starring Will Smith and based on the Asimov book of the same name, focus on the moral and ethical puzzles that will emerge as robots become more sophisticated. What if machines with advanced artificial intelligence turned out to be smarter than humans? It is reminiscent of the words of Sting’s Brass Around Your Finger: “I will turn your face to alabaster, when you find your servant to be your master.”
The folks at Boston Dynamics – founded by Alphabet – have been pushing the boundaries of robotics and AI for years. Alphabet sold the company to SoftBank which in turn sold it to Hyundai in 2020. Despite the change in ownership, the company continued to showcase its talents in several videos. From October 2018, he featured a mechanical dog named Spot dancing at Uptown Funk, sung by Bruno Mars, and a humanoid robot called Atlas running and jumping over obstacles. A dog twerking might not be high on your to-wish list, but Atlas could play a useful role in the real world – running around a burning building to save people, for example, or replacing warriors on the battlefield. The 2018 videos are shown below.
Two years later, Atlas developed further and gained a twin brother. Boston Dynamics’ latest video features a pair of Atlas robots grooving with Spot The Wonder Dog on the 1962 hit Do You Love Me? sung by The Contours, a wonderful group from Motown.
Some will watch the last video and quibble, “Yeah, he’s a dancing robot. It just runs programs written by humans. Big deal. “But these people may miss the big picture. In 2021, robots and AI will become more sophisticated. Artificial intelligence has already advanced to the point of being able to write its own programming. A dancing dog may just be a novelty or harbinger of things to come – a brave new world, so to speak, in which machines adapt better than humans to a hotter planet.
While we are busy celebrating our ingenuity in building robots that can dance, we may be ignoring the evidence that our time on Earth is drawing to a close. Literature and popular culture assume that humans will always win against impossible odds, but it may be the ultimate science fiction. When the next species to inhabit Earth arrives in several millennia, when the Earth cools again, the only record of human existence may lie in the digital pathways of robots like Atlas that we create in our image today.
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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 take him. You can follow it on Twitter but not on social media platforms run by evil lords like Facebook.
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