FOUR YEARS Y'ALL.
FOUR YEA-- FOUR YEARS!
Four years.
FOUR.
FOUUUR YEARRRS.
FourYears...
Wow.
Hello for the roughly twenty-seven hundredth time, I'm Trace, and you are all incredible
humans.
Four years ago on December 5th of 2012, we started DNews -- and my first video that day
was about THE ROBOT TAKEOVER!!
Let's do an update, shall we?
Over the last four years, there have been a lot of advances in robotics, but the scariest
and most amazing robot is ATLAS.
Yeah.
That's Atlas, Boston Dynamics' awesome humanoid robot.
It was first introduced in mid-2013 in a partnership with DARPA!
At the time, it was loud, clunky, and dragged around a massive tether, but now in 2016 oh
crap.
We're screwed.
In 2016, it was announced that ATLAS can walk outside, without a tether, with "sensors in
its body and legs to balance, and LIDAR and stereo sensors" with the goal of [quote] "making
robots that have mobility, dexterity, perception and intelligence comparable to humans and
animals, or perhaps exceeding them; this robot is a step along the way."
Dammit.
DAMMIT.
The legs of ATLAS are 3-D printed to include "arterial fluid routing," which is just creepy.
And in case Atlas isn't freaking you out, the US Navy and Virginia Tech has created
the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR) which also has two arms and two legs…
and it can walk on a ship.
Can YOU even walk on a ship?
Especially, one that's on fire?
Guess what, it's 2016 and robots can!
But don't show your fear, because soon robots could soon use emotions to manipulate your
meat brain into trusting them.
In a conference paper by researchers from Mississippi State University explored how
people could sense emotions from a robot named Mary…
The robot displayed anger, calm, fear, happiness and sadness; with success rates as high as
about 70-percent for calm and as low as 18 percent for happiness.
Apparently, they weren't awesome at displayed emotions, yet… but, a separate (more successful)
emotional robot is being tested with children in the Boston area.
The robot is talking with kids as they learn Spanish by reading their emotional cues and
responding as if the robot is a fellow child.
If the kid needs help the robot creates a motivational strategy based on their emotional
state…
wow creepy.
But if robots learn emotions, those emotions could help them override their own programming.
For example, a Raytheon scientist named James Crowder invented robots that were taught to
avoid light, but they also run on solar power -- this is a pretty serious conflict.
He told the Washington Post that even though they've been programed to think that light
"hurts them… they have to balance the instincts of ‘light still hurts, but if I don’t
find light, I die.’".
All these advances have some pretty interesting implications…
robots are learning to read and respond to our emotions and keep some for their own.
And they can now walk outside in the sunshine, AND can defy their own programming…
but robots are still a long way off from a full-blown 'take over.'
In 2012, I quoted Sir Martin Rees of the Center for Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge,
and he said we'd have about 50/50 chance of wiping ourselves out before 2100 -- with others
believing robots would be one of those things.
But then, in 2015, he said "[Robots] can’t tie your shoelaces or cut your toenails…”
[but] they're getting better…
He admits they'll probably take some routine jobs, and not just manufacturing, even in
medical and legal professions.
He goes on to say it's "likely that during this century our society and its economy will
be transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury’s out on whether they’ll
be ‘idiot savants’ or display superhuman capabilities."
Look, it’s inevitable that robots will eventually become intelligent.
To perform better at some tasks than we humans, but whether we'll start a war for the planet
is still up in the air.
In reality, maybe we'll transform our economy and none of us will ever need to (or really
be able to) work again.
Or, perhaps, robots will begin to colonize space for us, while we are stuck on Earth
thanks to radiation.
It's hard to know, but with the advances in the last four years, it's going to be a wild
ride for the next four.
Some of you have been with us at DNews since the beginning, thank you.
Some joined today, thank you.
Seriously, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for supporting us over these last
4 years.
2017 is going to be BIG!
So this was an update to one of the very first videos I did for DNews.
It aired on the very first day of DNews, December 5, 2012, watch it here and lets us know down
in the comments what you thought of this video and subscribe so you get more DNews.