If the idea of robots taking on humans in a road race conjures dystopian images of android athletic supremacy, then fear not, for now at least.
If the idea of robots taking on humans in a road race conjures dystopian images of android athletic supremacy, then fear not, for now at least.
I agree, it’s a bit of a weird take especially when we’re talking about robots in a marathon, not in a textile factory or flipping McBurgers.
I guess I was thinking: why give up the efficiency of wheels/tracks/propellers for walking (a less simple movement) and why only one set of arms? Why would you want a robot to look human at the cost of being as multitasking and movement challenged as it’s owner? I kept imagining Angry Bender from Futurama where he has 3 very maneuverable metal tentacle arms on each side. (Though normally he’s pretty humanoid in shape too). I still think we’re overly anthropomorphizing them and it’s a bit creepy. It seems like we’re building the tech based on Hollywood as much as anything else. I hear you when you say the shape is a good “fit” for our built environment, but I think we can do even better so it’s interesting that we decided our bodies were the pinnacle of biology and technology.
It’s not that we think the human form is the optimum, it is simply that we don’t want to have to modify human accessible areas for robots, partially because this increases the cost of automation and also partly because we need the environments to still be human accessible. In environments where you will only have robots, then the robots have freedom to be whatever design we want, but a general purpose robot needs to exist in a human-built environment, an environment with things like stairs, lips on curbsides, and boxes with handles designed for human hands. There are videos out there with the spot robot trying to do something simple like open a door with its weird giraffe neck arm thing, it’s not graceful and it’s not quick, because it is interacting with an object that was not designed with it’s body shape. It is much easier to build a human-shaped robot than it is to redesign all doors to have an interface to allow a robot of any arbitrary shape to operate it.
Also aesthetics do matter, if humans are going to be interacting with these robots they need to look like something that’s at least sort of friendly, if it looks like a multi limbed weird techno spider no one’s going to want to interact with them.