Darpa robot challenge showcases further potential for automation
While humanoid robots fumbled through basic tasks and obstacle courses, these slow and steady machines will surely win the race – for your jobs
It is very difficult to read the words “Defense Department” and “robots” and not immediately come up with the phrase “robot army”, but if this weekend’s contestants at the Darpa Robotics Challenge in Pomona, California invaded your town, the damage would be about what a gang of arthritic 90-year-olds could do, if those 90-year-olds also kept forgetting where they were and what they were trying to accomplish.
These robots stumbled, they broke, they stood motionless for half an hour, they couldn’t get out of the car. And this was the exciting version - the 2013 trials in this competition were “like watching paint dry”, according to one Darpa worker.
The robots may be coming slowly, and with a lot of stops and starts, and they often have to be repaired, reworked and disassembled over long period of time. But they are definitely coming
Questioning the Darpa Robot Challenge
Darpa is holding a robot competition
in Pomona,California
where many robots, in their current condition
are being compared to arthritic, forgetful
90 years olds,
"who forget where they are
and what they are trying to accomplish".
Oh, how those words jar---
even though written in clear and simple English,
because they describe me
to a tee
even though I'm still a couple of years shy
of ninety.
Now, while I might follow the current fashion
and sue ,
I just don't have any passion
that to do.
Instead, I'll ask this question,
which is also a suggestion:
Since there are, already accumulated, quite a collection
like me,of similarly incapable geezers,
with many more to come,
and we come already built for free,
why not take a new direction
and take some
of us out of the equivalent of freezers
to use instead of robots to do a task?
That is what I ask!
And since robots are just at the beginning
of their inning,
in making human beings obsolescent,
I expect age thirty five similarly soon will be senescent.
HZL
6/9/15
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