Little Dog Robot

The latest advancement in our innate desire to replace all drunk people with freakish, drunk-acting robots. Brought to you by DARPA.

:D

Big Dog Beta makes me happy

This is my first post ever, anywhere!

I stumbled upon an essay by David Hockney in The Guardian that I wanted to share... It's kind of all over the place (it goes off on at least one tangent I think) and I don't know enough about medieval European history to judge whether his analysis is accurate. (Many Guardian readers disagree with him, apparently.) But I think the following is paragraph pretty great food for thought. Reading it helped me realize how happy I am to be living in era when people are making video clips of Big Dog Beta and I'm able to watch them.

The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What's now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.

Check out the full article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/27/religion.filmnews?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

ROBOTS BEHAVING LIKE PEOPLES!

Well if not people, then spastic horse creature-things. This is really going to piss off GP at about 0:35 with his dysfunctionally wired empathy circuit, but I think it's worth the humiliation to prove what robots can do these days (make sure you at least watch the bit at 1:25! Slick!). I've seen videos from these Boston Dynamics guys before, and at this rate of progress I'm expecting full on helper monkey bots (Helbots?) within a years time. Should we throw caution to the wind and ignore all those apocalyptic scifi stories of robot revolutions against their creators? Of course we should!

Actually, how many are there? Off the top of my head: BSG, Dune (the early years), Terminator, Matrix, 2001 (not really robots, I guess)... I, Robot the movie doesn't count because it's piss, and the book is nothing like that.