Robo puppies

[Brian Roth]

MIT demo'ed some puppies playing:

https://newatlas.com/robotics/mits-backflipping-mini-cheetah-robots-head-outside-for-playtime/

Scroll down a bit on that page to see the video.

Bri

 

[Script]

Some Japanese puppies in these links

Paro (old by now)
https://youtu.be/g9wj5v22KsA/

Robear (getting more effective)
https://youtu.be/wOzw71j4b78

Pepper (not a puppy, but the Japanese are a very pragmatic people after all)
https://youtu.be/7L3Q1COVrOw

 

[Tubetec]

Have they fitted them with Uzi's yet  8)
The new dogs of war .

 

[ruffrecords]

I looks like each puppy has a radio control person. How much of their interaction is autonomous?

Cheers

Ian

 

[Script]

What's cool about the MIT quadrupeds is that they have good 'balance' and can roll and even flip over. That's difficult to achieve technically/physically with robots. But Boston Dynamics have developed even more amazing robots.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNnVtTHdF3A

The Japanese (and others) too have developped all sorts of quasi autonomous exoskeleton robots including Asimo and Kenshiro. However, as with most robots these days, they tend to be good at a rather limited set of things.

Meanwhile many remote controlled robots are developped in Japan especially for use in the Fukushima nuclear plant -- robots that can climb stairs,  small ones that can crawl through pipes, yet others that can swim. The plant premises have turned into a huge robot development and testing facility. But they all need to withstand high radiation, which is yet another big challenge.

 

[Tubetec]

The dexterity of those quads is very surprising indeed .
I wonder is their anti collision sensors on them too as despite playing in close proximity ,they didnt even touch once .
I suspect they could very easily be switched to 'pack' mode where its more a game of follow the leader .
I wonder how long before the various militaries have  parachute divisions of  attack dogs ,  a dozen of those could render an enemy airbase out of action very quickly and effectively .

 

[Script]

The interest of the military, which also finances Boston Dynamics, in quads is rather to use them for transporting small equipment to front lines and into danger zones :

 

[JohnRoberts]

Have they fitted them with Uzi's yet  8)
The new dogs of war .

What do you think drones are... ?

JR

 

[Tubetec]

Yeah well aware of them John, the Israelis have a drone system called 'Hermes' , you can find the add on youtube where they proudly proclaim they have supplied legitimate governments and paramilitary organisations all over the planet .
The 'payload' can be almost anything from eye in the sky to comms or jamming equipment and on up to air to ground missiles and no doubt a whole range of other offensive capabilities the public know little about .

Where A.I. , robots and war comes together reminds me  a bit of original Terminator ,  Sarah Conners thinks she talking to her mother on the phone , but Arnie has her voiceprinted  8)

 

[JohnRoberts]

Yeah well aware of them John, the Israelis have a drone system called 'Hermes' , you can find the add on youtube where they proudly proclaim they have supplied legitimate governments and paramilitary organisations all over the planet .
The 'payload' can be almost anything from eye in the sky to comms or jamming equipment and on up to air to ground missiles and no doubt a whole range of other offensive capabilities the public know little about .

Those troublemakers....  :

I somehow doubt the Houthi's used israeli drones to attack abqaiq refinery.

That technology race is well along with bad guys using their own drones and shooting down good guy's drones (of course that good guy/bad guy is all relative).

Where A.I. , robots and war comes together reminds me  a bit of original Terminator ,  Sarah Conners thinks she talking to her mother on the phone , but Arnie has her voiceprinted  8)

Terminator provided yet another warning about possible future risk from machine intelligence.

JR

PS: for something else to chew on, Amazon is talking about adding facial recognition to their doorbell cameras... how could that possibly go wrong? 

 

[Tubetec]

The Turks have some very serious drones now too , they might have been able to leap frog their technology off the back of downed Israeli hardware.

 

[Brian Roth]

Article about Boston Dynamics' (BD)  robo puppy being tested by the Mass. State Police:

https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/11/25/boston-dynamics-robot-dog-massachusetts-state-police

The article raises many points, and one was that BD doesn't want the bots weaponized.

On a lighter note, this a fun video showing "Spot" dancing, and then walking around a construction site, including a staircase:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gd7M1_SByE


Bri

 

[Tubetec]

Well BD might have considered  accepting military sponsorship and weaponisation on the same page ,rather than trying to limit things after the fact.

I ran into a large group of Boston Mass. cops here around 10 years ago , over here in Ireland playing golf with the Irish gardai and bringing them upto speed on 'the wire' type surveilence and other data processing techniques like biometric recognition . Quite a decent bunch of people actually , tough backrounds thats for sure , they could quite easily have gotten a reverse flip of the coin and turned out criminals .

What were seeing here now is the Gardai using biometric recognition without any underpinning in law .
South Wales police are  facing a legal challenge over how they captured and used a persons biometric data , its heading for the court of appeal in the UK but it will be years before this matter of grave public concern has its day in court ,meanwhile the illegal data processing continues . The line 'steel your face right off your head' from the Gratefull dead comes to mind .

Below is a picture of yesterdays farmers protest where the centre of Dublin was shut down , note the camera on the upper right hand side of the police mans uniform . Anyway just goes to show ,weaponisation doesnt have to involve robots with guns bullets or bombs at all . Now the farmers themselves are forbidding their images from publication over fears of being targeted .they have promised to escalate their protest today .

 

[Script]

On a lighter note, this a fun video showing "Spot" dancing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gd7M1_SByE

Some cool moves  8)

 

[ruffrecords]

Well BD might have considered  accepting military sponsorship and weaponisation on the same page ,rather than trying to limit things after the fact.

I ran into a large group of Boston Mass. cops here around 10 years ago , over here in Ireland playing golf with the Irish gardai and bringing them upto speed on 'the wire' type surveilence and other data processing techniques like biometric recognition .

I am not quite sure what the problem is. We use forensics all the time to catch criminals via their DNA for example, we take their fingerprints and  look at  CCTV footage to see if they are at/near the scene of crime. That is all biometric data. Would you ban dash cams?

Cheers

Ian

 

[Tubetec]

Hi Ian ,
Well in one sense you may have answered your own question , I wasnt so much against the case of cctv being processed to catch a criminal after the fact , the real issue for me is biometric data processing of people not suspected of crimes being added to a database . To put things another way what do you think would happen if the government announced  everybody was being fingerprinted as a deterrent against crimes not yet comitted or to rule out innocent people from their enquiries ,  theres a touch of tail wags dog about the whole thing you have to admit .  I wont go any further explaining the possible missuses of biometric data processing  ,but I do encourage everybody to look at this issue for themselves.

Saying you dont care about data protection because you have nothing to hide is the same as saying you dont care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say ,  not my words , Edward Snowden's .

 

[ruffrecords]

Hi Ian ,
Well in one sense you may have answered your own question , I wasnt so much against the case of cctv being processed to catch a criminal after the fact , the real issue for me is biometric data processing of people not suspected of crimes being added to a database .

I do not understand the distinction. As with CCTV you have the data. When you process it makes not difference. There is no need to  process data of people not suspected and certainly no resources to do it.

To put things another way what do you think would happen if the government announced  everybody was being fingerprinted as a deterrent against crimes not yet comitted or to rule out innocent people from their enquiries ,  theres a touch of tail wags dog about the whole thing you have to admit .  I wont go any further explaining the possible missuses of biometric data processing  ,but I do encourage everybody to look at this issue for themselves.

This happens a lot already. We were burgled several years ago. To help distinguish any fingerprints found at the scene we gave our fingerprints and so did our family who had visited recently. I rememeber seeing a TV program about the first murderer to be caught using DNA back in 1989. They took DNA samples from every man in the town, thousands of people. It was voluntary and very few men refused to give a sample. I think it is important to distinguish between our rights as citizens and our responsibilities as citizens. The UK law has recently been changed so you have to opt OUT of donating your body parts rather than opt in. Very few people opt out.

Saying you dont care about data protection because you have nothing to hide is the same as saying you dont care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say ,  not my words , Edward Snowden's .

Saying you want to fight for people's rights and ignoring their responsibilities is how shallow fools like Snowden operate. To paraphrase Kennedy, "Ask not what society can do for you but what you can do for society."

Cheers

Ian

 

[Tubetec]

There was a televised session from Leinster house today from  26th Nov , a committe meeting between the office of the data protection comissioner and various TD's , one of the main issues they were dealing with was data harvesting from phone mobile apps , voice in particular , it really should be no surprise to anyone who uses a smart phone to find out your general conversations could  be logged and processed , converted to text ,then used as a basis to advertise to you via  online apps advertising spaces ,  it listens ,it processes and it learns your preferences , and taps the conversation for key words and serves you up smorgasborg of what your after  at any particular point in time , I've spoken to more and more people now that are aware of it happening , I dont have a mobile or smart phone ,but if I did and I felt it looping itself into my conciousness  I'd bounce it off fecking the wall , its a social engineering  experiment  ,tantamount to slavery once the loop is closed . The government appeared like it had its head up its ass with regards our data protection in front of the comittee,  its basically left the big internet giants do anything they want with your data , Borris is the exact same ,promising  US marketing interests access to the data of the population .

What kind of odds do you reckon Id get if I walked into Paddy Powers and asked for a price on a hung parliment in the UK after the election ?  If you know your customers ,and a population is roughly 50/50 conservative/ liberal ,north /south or what ever the divide ,it  only takes a tiny sway vote to carry off a silent coup , the likes of cambridge analytica can pay the advertisers and  'click bait' the marginal voters ,  democracy is being made a mockery of by it .

 

[Tubetec]

be upstanding ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2W3aG8uizA&app=desktop

 

[Script]

Me feels you tapped into my record player ;D  8)

'You can fool some people sometimes,
But you can't fool all the people all the time'

However, as you rightly pointed out, some people sometimes obviously suffices.