The Hitchbot, a hitchhiking robot which was planned to tour the US has apparently failed to make it out of Philadelphia.
When hitchBOT the hitchhiking robot started his journey in Boston two weeks ago he wanted to see the entire country. Unfortunately, he never made it out of the Northeast. The researchers who built hitchBOT announced today that they need to stop the experiment because hitchBOT was vandalized in Philadelphia.
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The goal of the hitchhiking trip was to see how humans would interact with hitchBOT. And apparently the answer was "not well." HitchBOT has been around the world, including trips across the entirety of Canada and Germany without major incident. But America is clearly a hard land for our robot brothers and sisters.
Originally spotted at io9.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @02:35AM
Not true. Those fat-assed Grecians were getting pretty worked up lately, and the French will readily jump with such vigor if there is any suggestion that they need to do any actual work. If they put in only a fraction of the effort it takes for them to take to the street, burn cars, and battle police, they'd get their 30 hour work week in and there wouldn't be a need to have protested in the first place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @03:23AM
And yet somehow they're significantly more productive [businessinsider.com] than US workers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Monday August 03 2015, @03:41PM
You should reread that article you linked to, it doesn't say that the French are the most productive, it says that they're "likely to be the most productive" that's a completely different matter. The US worker is the most productive worker over all, but the Norwegians are usually up there if you do it on an hourly basis rather than just over all.
I'm not even sure why everything needs to turn into America bashing. Are you guys really that jealous?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03 2015, @04:45AM
Let's not make this into a nationalistic pissing match. One robot is a poor sample size to measure general vandalism.