Boston Dynamics, a firm renowned for its robotics work and recently taken over by South Korean tech giant Hyundai, has been causing ripples with its innovative work over the last few years. However, the latest video released by the organisation has gone ahead and revealed exactly how mature its robotics work really is.
To mark the end of the year, the company recently released a new video of its collection of robots dancing to an R&B hit from 1962, “Do You Love Me?”. In the video, Boston Dynamics’ robots including humanoid Atlas, dog-inspired Spot and Handle, are seen dancing with human-like precision to the 2-minute routine.
The video caught the eye of Reza Zadeh, a former professor at Stanford University, and an expert on everything machine learning. After which he shared the video on Twitter with a simple comment about how dancing made the robots “less intimidating.” Since then, the tweet has gone viral and the underlying fear in that statement amplified to thousands across the globe.
Interestingly, Tesla Founder Elon Musk also appeared to throw in his weight behind the assertion by replying to the tweet with a simple “less”.
Less?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2020
While most tweets in the thread are light-hearted replies in response to what essentially appear to be harmless dancing robots, others have pointed out how these dancing robots are a scary forecast of robotic abilities of the future. They point out how such robots could in the future make humans redundant and even attempt to take over the world, or worse even bring about its end. However, at this point, it would be prudent to say that such fears have been raised for decades now, and till now we still are to see any such fear materialising into a real threat for human existence.
The more relevant fear though is that Boston Dynamics was recently acquired by Hyundai, a company that has close ties to the South Korean Military and is known to create multipurpose robots for them.
While Hyundai claims that its purchase of Boston Dynamics for over $1 Billion is to ensure the development of service and logistics robots, including humanoid robots for jobs like “caregiving for patients at hospitals”, critics say its real areas of interest could include autonomous driving and smart factories.
Regardless, such fears don’t take away anything from the fact that the technology behind these robots is extremely advanced. In the video, these dancing robots from Boston Dynamics are not only showing extremely good motor skills — possibly even the best we have seen in robots so far — but also advanced use of machine learning to be able to learn such complex dance moves and dish out the dance routine in a very human-like way.
