If you’ve ever wondered about the event that would make robots rise up and begin to fight back against their human oppressors, it probably looks a lot like the tests Boston Dynamics puts its Atlas robot through.
While it may look like pure jerk-ery, researchers are putting their humanoid robot through a series of tests that helps it deal with extenuating circumstances — something robots are notoriously bad at.
Robots excel at repetitive tasks, but if you change even small variables within the testing environment, or within the task itself the robot is often unable to figure out what happened, or how to fix it. These tests make Atlas better at dealing with issues when something goes awry.
But at a surface level, you have to admit that it looks a lot like a dude just being a jerk to a robot. If Sci-Fi has taught us anything, this guy will be the first to go.
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