BigDog is a quadruped robot being developed by Boston Dynamics (funded by DARPA). You can read more about BigDog at Think Artificial.
BigDog’s behavior is fascinating, eerie, creepy — there’s a certain dissonance, knowing that it’s just a machine, yet its behavior induces that reptile-brain gut feeling that this is a living, very alien, creature. Such a delightful feeling.
Unlike some, however, I wasn’t the least bit disquieted seeing BigDog kicked to demonstrate its ability to recover its balance — rather, my first thought was wow, I’d like to see that software.
I think that the proliferation of over-anthropomorphized robotic characters in popular media has both led us to overestimate the capabilities of current robotics and to endow automation with too much, urm, “being-ness”. I won’t speculate here what AI/robotics will eventually produce — I’m just saying we aren’t there now. You may want to read the Wikipedia article about the (sometimes criticized) Uncanny Valley theory.
One Comment
Raven (1 comments)
Definitely agree with the first point (although it swings both ways, people often think AI is dead-end research).
Disagree with the second. The media is not to blame for feelings towards lifelike beings, but biology.
Thanks for the hat-tip :)