Holy Backflipping Robots! Artificial Intelligence Is Here!
Following Boston Dynamic’s newest update, you don’t have to be Batman’s sidekick, Robin, to say things like “holy backflipping robots!”
On November 16th, the Massachusetts based engineering and robotics company released a video of their most lifelike robot, Atlas, jumping through a simple obstacle course with his finale being a backflip from one platform to another. What makes Atlas so incredible, though, is that he wasn’t just programmed to do this one course; his cameras and sensors observed the course and guided him through it based on his artificial intelligence, or AI.
Along the same lines as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, AI is the concept of creating an artificial brain within a computer, allowing any given system the ability to think for itself. This can be seen in Atlas, as well as the other robots Boston Dynamics has produced. An earlier video of “SpotMini”, a pathfinding robot meant to help out around the house, demonstrated its ability to serve and clean up after its owners. “BigDog”, an older model, was developed with a military application that could traverse any terrain regardless of the variables in it – just like Atlas.
SpaceX and Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, was quick to respond to the video, commenting that “this [flip was] nothing” and that “in a few years, [Atlas] will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it…”, meaning that the robot would appear as a blur unless there was a strobe light to isolate frames of movement that your eyes could process. Being the future-minded man he is, he then released another tweet advocating for regulation of AI technology, outlining the concern of a quickly growing technology with disastrous potential. This is not to bring up ideas of a robot revolution though. Rather, Musk was alluding to similar concerns that Google and their Deep Mind program had published in an earlier paper, namely that if AI continues to evolve as quickly as it has been, any small mistake in a code could lead to some more serious problems like valuable items being mistaken for garbage, or doesn’t recognize your new haircut and calls the cops on you. That should be fun.
That being said, there is plenty of AI in modern day, like Tesla’s self-driving cars. While it is as simple as recognizing road lines with cameras and using proximity sensors to know where other cars are, Tesla’s software has the artificial intelligence needed to drive your car for you. Earlier versions of AI were made by IBM Computers, namely the chess playing Deep Blue and the Jeopardy! playing Watson. Both computers were able to best their world champion, human opponents at the time of their creation, and Watson has now continued on to aid in the healthcare sectors of whomever purchases it. It also became a weather forecaster, a teaching assistant, tax-preparation system, and designed a dress that changed based on the tweets made about it. Jesus, when they told him he could be anything, they probably didn’t think he would be everything.
0 Comments Add a Comment?