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By Jennifer Conrad | 12.16.21 We are shuttering the Tech in Two newsletter at the end of the year. In the meantime, we're going to share other newsletters we think you'll like. From artificial intelligence to battery breakthroughs, Fast Forward covers what's next in technology. Sign up to receive this email every Monday and Thursday. Good morning! Sometime during the stay-at-home days of fall 2020, I bought a robot dinosaur—named Dino, because who was feeling creative back then?—who became a star of my Instagram feed and Zoom happy hours. He's the best, but his robot dog peers seem to have gone from cute to cruel. | For most of the 20th century, robot dogs were seen as a harmless if silly diversion. Take 'Lectronimo, the robot pet of the futuristic 1960s cartoon The Jetsons: It was no match for the charm of real dog Astro and ended up as a laugh line on the show. "Our nearly 100-year romance with the robot dog, however, has come to a dystopian end," writes Britt H. Young. "While Boston Dynamics explicitly prohibits their dogs being turned into weapons, Ghost Robotics' Q-UGV is currently patrolling an Air Force base [and] SWORD Defense Systems is creating a weapon attachment for Ghost's robot dogs." Mechanical life, historically called automata, dates back at least 300 years to an odd contraption called the defecating duck that chewed on a bit of grain and was rigged to ... defecate. More recently, in the late '90s, Sony introduced AIBO, a robot dog that can play and do tricks, but never required food or walks. Somewhere along the way, robot dogs were enlisted for public safety and defense more than recreation, and the perception went from cuddly to creepy. And as we've learned more about how artificial intelligence can be used to erode privacy, even mechanical pets designed for fun and companionship may seem like roving surveillance and data-collection devices. Read about the demise of the robot dog. | Deep(er) Learning: Robot Evolution The bizarre robots look like cobbled-together Tetris pieces. A new system "evolves" them to run, climb, and throw stuff better. | |
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