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Boston Dynamics introduces a fully electric humanoid robot that “exceeds human performance”
(spectrum.ieee.org)
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Technology
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War and policing. You're dug into a foxhole/bunker with your bolt action rifle, and a few thousand of these things come marching along. Or you're protesting the party in power, so a few hundred of these automated law enforcement officers get sprung loose to "keep the peace"
You do understand how expensive and impractical that would be, right? Training a thousand 18-year olds to handle anti-material rifles is going to be far, far cheaper than doing maintenance on a hundred of these robots.
You don't need humanoid robots for that.
Also battery life, You can give a human a couple of sandwiches and they'll go all day, the robot probably needs a 20kg battery and still won't go more than 8 hours without charging. Its actually one of the kind of mindblowing things about organic systems, A whole human body runs on less power than just the control unit for one of these robots (assuming its similar to a mid range laptop) let alone the motors.
Wait how many Kcal does a laptop burn a day?
Its based on a rough calculation, a humans energy consumption averages to about a 126w supply, a mid range laptop uses about 150w. Admitedly a humans energy consumption is going to change a lot moment to moment but then so is the robots.
Hmm... well considering small sedentary adults need like around 1,200 to survive, then a mid range laptop seems like it would require 1,400.
Nah its based on a 2000kcal/day person, there's a still a lot of caveats sure like the person has to sleep but considering we're comparing to literally just the robots brain a human is way more efficient.
I have a very simple test for these things when it comes to military stuff - would this or that piece of tech have proved an obstacle to the NLF (you know... that organisation people insist on calling the "Viet Cong)?
And the answer for this robot is... only if the objective was to provide them with lots of fancy scrap metal.
Expensive and impractical today, yes. But we would say the same of every man, woman, and child having a supercomputer with the entirety of human knowledge in their pocket fifty years ago.