Google’s New Robot Can Aggressively Leap Over Almost Anything: But For What?

A new robot created by Boston Dynamics, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is possibly the most agile and aggressive one seen yet.

The video of it leaping over obstacles already has millions of views.

The official video says:

“Handle is a research robot that stands 6.5 ft tall, travels at 9 mph and jumps 4 feet vertically. It uses electric power to operate both electric and hydraulic actuators, with a range of about 15 miles on one battery charge. Handle uses many of the same dynamics, balance and mobile manipulation principles found in the quadruped and biped robots we build, but with only about 10 actuated joints, it is significantly less complex. Wheels are efficient on flat surfaces while legs can go almost anywhere: by combining wheels and legs Handle can have the best of both worlds.”

According to Zero Hedge:

“One year ago, when we showed readers the SkyNet-like robots produced by Boston Dynamics, a company acquired by Google in 2013 (which then tried to flip it to Toyota last year but reportedly failed)  we called the robotic creations “terrifying.” Little did we know that compared to Boston Dynamics’ next spawn, that particular batch was downright Johnny 5-friendly by comparison. Because after being briefly shown off at an event early this month, the robotic designed has officially revealed its latest creation, “Handle,” which the company’s founder previously described as “nightmare-inducing.”

Four weeks ago, Boston Dynamics – which is best known for its bipedal and quadrupedal robots – revealed it had been experimenting with some radical new tech: the wheel. The company named its new wheeled, upright robot is named Handle (“because it’s supposed to handle objects”) and looks like a cross between a Segway and the two-legged Atlas bot according to the Verge. Handle, which had not been officially unviled yet, was shown off by company founder Marc Raibert in a presentation to investors. Footage of the presentation was uploaded to YouTube by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson.”

Boston Dynamics is a military industrial complex affiliated corporation that finds origin in MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), as many similiar entities have come from that area.

They work very closely with DARPA, the Pentagon’s mad science division, and are similar to a MITRE Corporation or Raytheon, focusing on their own niche in robotics. Researchers such as Peter A. Kirby have exposed MIT and their long history with the military industrial complex.

Most people don’t understand where this trajectory is going, because they don’t know the history of the entities creating it. DARPA, MIT, Raytheon, Boston Dynamics, General Atomics, these institutions and corporations have done the world more damage than one can easily summarize. They have already been damaging the world for decades.

Yet mainstream articles exude a satirical, joking tone about killer robots. But if you had been the victim of one of these, in a place where the US government decided to occupy your land and use force against you, this would be a nightmare to you.

Although it’s obviously fantastic that something like this could exist, it’s naive to the point of fatal to think we should just laugh it off and not really pay attention to the developing technology, and not actively anticipate it being a factor in our future.

It’s like how people detached from war zones feel about drones: they don’t really care. But if you lived in Pakistan where the US drones made by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems terrorized your neighborhood, you would have very different feelings about high technologies of war.

People laughing it off, going about their daily lives while these things are developed are going to bear moral culpability for many things in the future.

People do laugh it off when they aren’t face to face with the actual victims. One could cite many things to prove this, but to cite just one, an article from the Examiner is jokingly titled “US Air Force terminates Predator drones. Now you will fear the Reaper” (jokingly referencing a popular song).

If you joke like that, and have that naive, blank faced docile acceptance of Reaper drones that the Examiner article did, you’re free falling into a hellish future. There are so many options for how robots and drones could spiral out of control.

So considering how it could be abused, do we really need these machines? Do we really need any of these things, when we have everything we have now? When will we stop and say “that’s enough technology for now?”

We can say “we don’t need this” to a technology and successfully stop it from spiraling out of control. That can be gauged by Google’s own official statement on how powerful negative press was against them:

Speaking about one of Boston Dynamics’ past robots: “There’s excitement from the tech press, but we’re also starting to see some negative threads about it being terrifying, ready to take humans’ jobs,” a director of communications at Google and the spokeswoman for Google X, Courtney Hohne told Tech Insider.

Our opinion matters. Our decisions to accept or reject things determines the trajectory of our future.

(image credit: TIC, LT, BD)