Author: julien

Promobot self-destructs (reputation) with help of self-driving Tesla

A meme doing the rounds on social media sent me down a rabbit hole of clickbait articles strangely all converging to this ice-cream truck shaped android called Promobot.

Grey surveillance video showing a strange looking android robot standing still on the side of a road. A Tesla passes by and the robot tips over. A person runs across the street to bring assistance to the robot.

The meme mainly emphasized how Promobot made the news in 2019 when their inventor claimed a self-driving Tesla ran over it and “killed” it.

A robot doing seppuku with the help of another robot has quite a bit of meme power, I agree.

It gets strange when you read that Promobot is that same proud Russian droid that recognized and shook hands with Vladimir Putin a few months earlier.

Maybe those two events are related.

But it does not stop here. Promobot was also “arrested” at a political rally and, according to the company recount of the events, the “police tried to handcuff” it. Sure.

It’s that same robot that is sooooo intelligent, it “escaped form its lab” and blocked traffic for a few hours while its creators were busy taking photos of the incident.

You can’t make up this shit.

Don’t kick my robotaxi

A pretty good summary of the issues with robotaxis right now. The gap between young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and tenured city officials is abysmal. Best part of the video is right at the beginning, when we see the journalist trapped in an expensive fully automated metal box getting kicked by an angry citizen not allowed to park their car because of the “intelligence” of said metal box.

We have no standards on which to base whether these vehicle are actually as safe as humans, safer than humans or not as safe as humans, except to trust that these companies are telling us the truth about their safety statistics

Sam Abuelsamid, Principal Research Analyst

Fully autonomous killer drones are “a logical and inevitable next step”

Drones can already recognize targets such as armored vehicles using cataloged images. But there is disagreement over whether the technology is reliable enough to ensure that the machines don’t err and take the lives of noncombatants.

Source: Drone advances in Ukraine could bring dawn of killer robots | AP News