Earlier this year, videos of a robot being kicked, hit with a chair, and shot at by its human owners spread online. Created by an LA-based production company, Corridor Digital, the videos were a parody of those released by Boston Dynamics, a company that has been making robots since 1992.
But the general tone of the videos is ominous – like the one of this militaristic looking robot called BigDog being kicked and then recovering. Watching the machine regain composure is chilling. You almost expect it to turn around and retaliate, hinting at a future when this might, in fact, happen.
That we respond with a sense of fear to sophisticated-seeming robots makes sense. Robots have been associated with a narrative of insurrection and replacement since they made their debut in Karel Capek’s 1920 play, Rossum’s Universal Robots, which was about worker robots violently overthrowing their human overlords. This narrative has been repeated ever since in movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator, and more recently, the HBO series Westworld.
The deeper problem, though, is that conflating real robots with make-believe robots distracts and obfuscates questions of agency and responsibility.
The fact that Boston Dynamics has been repeatedly funded by Darpa, an agency of the United States Department of Defense? That’s something to think about. The fact that Boston Dynamics are advertising SpotMini for surveillance tasks? That’s something to think about. The robot apocalypse, not so much.
Boston Dynamic’s videos are, to be sure, entertaining. But by raising the alarm of robot takeover they achieve the self-serving purpose of reasserting unrealistic fantasies about technology’s power, while redirecting away from more critical examination of human decisions and design practices.
It is in this way that the behavior of companies makes us realize whether they are sufficiently aware of the tasks they carry out or the creations they make in their labs. As consumers we have the responsibility to observe these companies.
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Yes, hyena robots are scary. But they're also a cunning marketing ploy
Shwartz, OSCAR. (2019). Yes, hyena robots are scary. But they're also a cunning marketing ploy. Recuperado el 24 de abril de 2020 de https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/10/hyena-robots-marketing-boston-dynamics