Atlas, The Next Generation

Let me guess, the new robot is called Cylon and is created by Greystone Industries? [LINK] More seriously, a pretty amazing product. It doesn't seem to be far from being actually useful for limited manual labor. Video embedded in the article: [VIDEO]

Have you seen the latest robot from Boston Dynamics? Here is Atlas: [VIDEO] I don't think we need 30y for a real robot application for old people. This could be in less than 10 years.

Other things called Atlas: HashiCorp's Enterprise Suite - [LINK] Stripe's startup tools - [LINK] Netflix's Telemetry Platform - [LINK] O’Reilly's learning environment - [LINK] Boston Dynamics's Robot - [LINK] [VIDEO] Did I miss any?

Depending on how you mean 'reasoning, walking robots' then not yet really.. but every few weeks or months another amazing deep learning/NN whatever thing comes out in different domains. So these types of techniques seem to have very broad application. Of course, if you mean 'walking' in a literal sense, there are a number of impressive walking robots such as Atlas [VIDEO] , HRP-2 [LINK] or HRP 4C [LINK] , etc.. Also there are many types of useful reasoning systems. I am guessing you are thinking of language understanding and generation.. but I believe these types of techniques are being applied quite impressively in that area also, from DeepMind or Watson [LINK] etc.

Man, if we think this self-driving car thing is jarring, I wonder how we'll adjust to the incoming teachable general purpose biped robots... [VIDEO] Basically, however fast we think self-driving cars are happening and requiring adjustment, that shift is like we're still on training wheels, compared to the real game-changer. We'd better figure out how to take care of those truckers and taxi-drivers, or it doesn't bode well for our adaptability as a society.

The Beam is a wimpy teleoperator. Send the new Atlas, from Boston Dynamics [1], to a conference, and you won't have that problem. People running away in terror might be more of an issue. (It's not clear what will become of Boston Dynamics. Google wants to sell them. DARPA and the Marines gave up on their BigDog as not militarily useful. The technology is impressive, but it cost well over $100 million (mostly DoD funding) and 25 years to get to this point, with no market in sight.) [1] [VIDEO]

Your examples have a point in them - To really understand how insects fly, it is helpful to build and analyze various machines that can flap its wings - since aerodynamics is complex and the equations we use to model airplanes don't really work on that scale. To understand how exactly humans walk, it really helps to build a machine that can lift its two feet in alternating motion and analyze how all the minor forces interact to make it work. It's immensely useful when we're building e.g. powered ankle prosthetics, and bipedal movement has some advantages in terrain, so we also want machines to be able to do that (e.g. [VIDEO] ) For understanding human eyes - experimenting with lense systems that change focus was how we got to "augmented vision" e.g. humans with spectacles. The same goes for analyzing and understanding how human brains work. It's also valuable to think about minds in general, but for many purposes we care about a particular mind, and all the individuals I currently care about are homo sapiens, not machines; so we need to understand their brains.

Someone sent me this article on IM. My (unedited) response: nothing worse than someone who both doesn't understand wtf he's talking about and is very critical either are ok on their own >> He‘s wrong then? well if either author can provide an article from 10-20 years ago, saying "in 10-20 years, we'll invent a single machine that can reach almost human-level translation proficiency, drive a car in complex environments, beat the best human player at logical games including chess and Go, beat the best human player at language/knowledge based games like Jeopardy, hold a lengthy conversation and answer questions, be able to accurately describe and caption images and video, and outperform humans at trading the stock market and detecting fraud but I won't be impressed because all of those things are simple" then it might have some weight "The dream of artificial intelligence was supposed to be grander than this — to help revolutionize medicine, say, or to produce trustworthy robot helpers for the home." robots: we already have the vacuum cleaners. Actual flexible domestic work is coming soon, the moment the military gets bored and releases some knowledge and/or people have finished making money from helping amazon pack boxes and starts making money from normal people instead: [VIDEO] medicine: same machines already being used to detect cancer and heart conditions more accurately than humans, as well as folding proteins to create new medicines. Not sure what more he wants.. "If mach