BOSTON DYNAMICS FINALLY PROGRESSES TO POINT WHERE THEIR ROBOTS NOW MOVE AND ACT LIKE THE ONES IN THOSE TERRIFYING DYSTOPIAN FUTURE MOVIES by Geoffrey Grider for Now The End Begins
Boston Dynamics headquarters looks pretty normal. Inside, however. it’s anything but. If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this. There are robots in corridors, offices and kennels. They trot and dance and whirl and the 200-or-so human roboticists, who build and often break them, barely bat an eye. That is Atlas, the most human-looking robot they’ve ever made. It’s nearly 5 feet tall, 175 pounds, nd is programmed to run, leap and spin like an automated acrobat. Marc Raibert, the founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics doesn’t like to play favorites, but definitely has a soft spot for Atlas.
Boston Dynamics is a cutting-edge robotics company that’s spent decades behind closed doors making robots that move in ways we’ve only seen in science fiction films.
In the early 200’s, there was a whole slew of dystopian robot movies like ‘I, Robot’, ‘The Matrix’, ‘Surrogates’, ‘A.I Artificial Intelligence’ and so many others. They were thrilling and terrifying at the same time, yet the realization of that technology was far, far into the future, right? Wrong. The vast majority of the things predicted in those movies have either already come to pass or in the process of. At Boston Dynamics, the future is yesterday.
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In the early ‘blog days’ of NTEB, we did articles on robot technology, and it was amazing the level they had got it to by 2011, 2016, but here in 2021 these robots move with human-like mobility, with refined, complex movements and gestures in a way that is most unsettling when you first see it. When you add the AI components of Virtual and Augmented Reality to that, you see very quickly where all this is headed. But don’t worry, the folks at Boston Dynamics assure us that, even though they look just like the robots in those scary movies, they could never actually revolt and take over. Whew! What a relief. So glad they said that could never happen. (rolling my eyes).
Boston Dynamics: Inside the workshop where robots of the future are being built
FROM CBS NEWS: They occasionally release videos on YouTube of their life-like machines spinning, somersaulting or sprinting, which are greeted with fascination and fear. We’ve been trying, without any luck, to get into Boston Dynamics’ workshop for years, and a few weeks ago they finally agreed to let us in. After working out strict COVID protocols, we went to Massachusetts to see how they make robots do the unimaginable.
From the outside, Boston Dynamics headquarters looks pretty normal. Inside, however. it’s anything but. If Willy Wonka made robots, his workshop might look something like this. There are robots in corridors, offices and kennels. They trot and dance and whirl and the 200-or-so human roboticists, who build and often break them, barely bat an eye.
