People Freaking Out About A Robot That Can Open Doors And I Kind Of Thought They Could Do That Already
WALTHAM (CBS) – Just a few months ago, Boston Dynamics introduced us to a robot that can do backflips.
Now they can open doors.
A new YouTube video posted by the Waltham robotics company Monday shows a robot using its mechanical arm to turn a handle and open a door. It even kindly holds the door open so its “buddy” can walk through.
“Doors can no longer stop them,” one commenter wrote. “We’re DOOMED.”
While one person commented that the robot was “cute,” the consensus on Twitter was “terrifying.”
Full story here.
Look, I’m fully onboard of the “robots are going to murder us” train. In fact I’ve used this blog as a mouthpiece to voice my concern over developments in robot technology many times. This just seems like not that big of a deal. Like okay cool, robots can open doors now. Is that really the one thing that convinces you that they’re going to wipe us off the face of the earth? Were you so convinced that doors were going to save you before? What a dumb thing to think. It’s foolish to think that this conversation would ever happen, “How do we stop these robots?” “Oh we just shut the doors?” Yeah, not happening. One, I thought that robots already knew how to open doors: if my dogs can figure it out then so can the Terminators. Two, even if they didn’t know how to open them, robots are made of metal: they wouldn’t have any trouble breaking down these flimsy frames in the first place. I’m sorry but I just find it hard to believe that anybody would be so naive as to think that a door was going to save you from a robot, ever. What were we doing to do? Just trap them in a room like a disposable Sims character we're tired of and wait until they run out of batteries? Come on boys and girls it’s that type of thinking that’s going to get us apocalypsed in the first place.
I’m actually relieved to hear about this. I’m relieved because it means that the scientists wasted time teaching this robot how to push a latch down instead of teaching it how to shoot lasers out its eyes. Now instead of having thermo vision that can track us through walls, robocop can turn a knob- that’s an easy trade off. That’s a gimme. I’ll take that ten times out of ten. That being said, if we’re talking a Signs type situation and there’s going to be one tiny thing that gets us out of the end of the world and that tiny thing was robots not knowing how to open doors… I take this all back and we’re fucked.
