SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Boston Dynamics releases video of Atlas robot doing parkour:
In the video[#1], two Atlas robots navigate jumps and steps of varying heights, vaulting over and running along a balance beam before ending the routine with two backflips a piece.
It's more than most humans can do, but the team at Boston Dynamics explain that the robots aren't intelligently navigating an unfamiliar course. They've been programmed and trained to complete it.
"It's not the robot just magically deciding to do parkour," chief technology officer Aaron Saunders said.
"It's kind of a choreographed routine, much like a skateboard video, or a parkour video, where it's an athlete that's practised these moves.
[...] The behind-the-scenes peek[#2] at how the often viral videos are made shows the stumbles and fumbles that often result when making a 175cm, 75kg robot do parkour.
[...] While the routines are rehearsed and pre-programmed, Atlas has become more capable at assessing its own environment and its movements now are much more based on perception than in previous videos, Boston Dynamics said.
Videos on YouTube #1 (1m6s) and #2 (5m50s).
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday August 20 2021, @09:22PM
You and me both. Sadly, socially useful products are mostly much less profitable for our "betters" that are making the decisions. After all, the purpose of war spending isn't ultimately to kill, maim, and make people miserable - that's just a stepping stone on the way to the pillaging and oppression that enriches and empowers the select few who "matter"
And less spitefully - there's just far less demand for cutting-edge socially useful products. The people that could afford the first few generations of technology already have human servants that do the work for them anyway, better and with with far more ego-gratification than any clumsy robot (or whatever) could provide. So even if we dumped tax dollars into developing such technologies - the amount of money and time would have to be vastly greater to reach the point where the market could begin to take over. How many generations of nursemaid robot would have to sit basically unused, or maybe raffled off to get user feedback from people who couldn't hope to afford them, before they matured to the point that the upper-middle class would consider them a worthwhile investment and start really driving cost savings from large economies of scale.
High technology just really isn't something within reach of the mass market - it's only after the underlying technologies have matured and cheapened to the point that the middle-class can afford products based on them that they have an opportunity to take off.