You have probably already seen somewhere on the web the video below, which is a great parody of the videos produced by the famous robotics company Boston Dynamics. The protagonist of this video is a computer-generated copy of the famous Atlas robot. Several “supposed employees” of Boston Dynamics kick, punch and even shoot the robot with a gun until the robot “gives them back”.
The quality of the computer graphics in this video is at such a high level that everything that happens is perceived as real. Naturally, most people have a sense of outrage directed at the people mocking the robot, and sympathy directed at the robot itself. This is a completely natural reaction for humans, and it shows the problems we may face when robots like Atlas become commonplace in our environment.
Some of the people might argue that humans cannot harm a robot. Yes, of course, robots have no awareness of their own, feel no pain, and, from this perspective, can only be broken. However, despite such an obvious fact, it is easy enough to make humans view robots as human beings, with all the consequences that follow. “We are biologically predisposed to think of any isolated object that moves independently in the space around us as alive,” says Kate Darling, an ethics and robotics specialist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “So most people will subconsciously think of robots as living.”
Awareness of this problem may help shape the human mentality in the future so that people will treat robots “humanly,” so to speak. This, in turn, will prevent the emergence of individuals who, reveling in their supposedly unlimited power, will vandalize robots in front of everyone, doing their job or helping people on the streets, in supermarkets, or in other public places.
Note that the first video was created by a company from Los Angeles called Corridor Digital, which has long specialized in such things for the cinema. And just below is the second video, in which Corridor Digital employees demonstrate the techniques they used. The first video shown here is a slightly stripped-down version of the original video, from which the scene where the “raving” robot takes people at gunpoint near the end was removed.
