DARPA funds all kinds of crazy stuff but humanoid robots probably aren’t ideal for battle compared to, say, miniature tank-style robots or the flying drones that they’ve been using for a long time.
The Boston Dynamics robots that are actually selling in large numbers and doing the useful work out in the world are their boring industrial ones that unload boxes from trucks, not the parkour bots or dogs.
The main practical application for humanoid robots in the near future is in the entertainment industry. So look to companies like Disney to fund that research. (And they definitely do!)
Future funding is likely to come from other, less kid-friendly parts of the entertainment industry but I prefer not to think about that too much…
They did this in a CHiPS episode in the early 1980s.
“MERV”
A few months later, I saw the same robot (now with a plastic bubble over its head) as part of the Oldsmobile presentation at the Ft. Worth Auto Show. There was a guy walking around off to the side, speaking into a microphone, & his words came out of MERV’s head.
42-ish years later & they’re still trying to put one over on us with MERV.
At the Auto Show, the spokesperson was frozen like a mannequin, up on the giant turntable with the new Oldsmobile. MERV selected a couple of kids from the audience & told them to tickle the spokesperson under the armpit. Which they did. I mean, how do you top that kind of interactivity?
Looks likely that Musk is going to get his very own city, along with the authority to close public beaches whenever he wants.
I learned today that Texas actually has a pretty good law in place that provides public access not just to the high-tide line at beaches (which is how it works in California) but all the way up to the line of vegetation. But those kinds of public access rights don’t mean much when the world’s richest man wants to have his way.
I calculate that there are, at minimum, slightly more than 2 suckers born every minute within the US alone (just to account for the “crazification factor”/Trump voters).
And most unfortunately for Musk, that group contains almost all potential Tesla customers…
So many headlines translate to me as “Shamefully small percentage of Americans are finally against thing 100% of Americans should have been against at least half a decade ago.”
