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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Boston Dynamics: ATLAS bipedal robot

Historically speaking, people want to see anything but that. Honda discovered people stopped calling them SkyNet when they started making the ASIMO line smaller than people.

That's an evolutionary line of increased terror, followed by abrupt cutification.





OftenBen  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Different products for different markets though. ASIMO isn't intended to go stomping around the terrorist bastion flavor of the day, ATLAS is.

kleinbl00  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Same same.

Pretend you're a Pakistani NOT terrorist. You're just trying to get through your day. There are drones overhead that can blow you up at any minute (which is extralegal as fuck, by the way) and your primary concerns are access to clean water and earning enough from your blacksmith shop to keep your family in lentils. Aside from the aforementioned "death from above" issues and the fact that the local warlords have started flashing ISIS flags.

Suddenly, the US Army shows up as a "peacekeeping" force. Which are you more likely to think is more interested in "keeping the peace", this:

Or this?

Here's the thing: The United States will never fight a conventional ground war ever again. Period. End of line. The invasion of Iraq took what? A week? While the suppression of Iraq took ten years? And how effective was it?

There's no tactical advantage in making Robocop look like Robocop. You are going to have an easier time pacifying Lahore with the Care Bears Army than you ever will with Black Widow Company.

OftenBen  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Point taken. Personally, I find the PsychoPass version way scarier.

kleinbl00  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Which is by design. Psycho Pass is nothing if not dystopian. However, the Patlabor version is only 15 years old and we were still thinkin' Robocop. Conventional Wisdom on this stuff is fluid.

user-inactivated  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Building killer robots children are going to want to play with in the name of public relations strikes me as a bad idea.

kleinbl00  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Building killer robots strikes me as a bad idea.

FTFY

user-inactivated  ·  3385 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Your comment made me think of two things:

1) two Doctor Who episodes in which new beings slowly infiltrated Earth/London either as "cute" walking lumps of human fat, or inert black cubes that people adopted as pet rocks before the cubes started to take over the world

2) The scene in Age of Ultron where Tony Stark sends a gaggle of his peacekeeping robots to try to calm a crowd, and the crowd starts throwing rocks at them.