I wonder what proportion of the development efforts go into securing these things.
Imagine what would be happen, if these robots start getting hacked. A virus would no longer be just sitting inside a computer, it would manifest itself in a physical form.
Hardcore viruses/trojans/worms/whatever can create physical implications: disrupting power grids, sabotaging nuclear programs[0], etc.
But, even the basic forms of viruses which hackers will start out with, can cause serious consequences because of the physicality of these robots. And not just advanced robots like BostonDynamics', even basic autonomous robots have a high potential to do physical harm, if hacked.
I somehow feel, people should focus more on securing these things vs empowering them with increased intelligence, agility and sheer strength.
I would like to know, if security of these systems rely on the current state of computers, or do they have a different set of guidelines to abide by, considering that the attack vectors can be vastly different.
With the current computer systems, most attacks are done via the internet. But with these, physical access can exploit a whole different range of vulnerabilities, which can be difficult for the bot the detect. Like, how the old PS/2 hardware keyloggers turned out to be quite difficult to detect[1].
What if someone just sticks a different kind of lens in front of the camera(s)/sensor(s) these systems rely on, which can just break all the math it is doing around visuals.
Does the current state of the art of securing these systems, handle these cases ?
I've rewatched this video maybe 10 times since it came out a few days ago. The jogging part -- it's so hard to believe, still seems like CG but looking forward to seeing this in person. I love this stuff -- so much world-revolutionizing potential captured in this video!
As Elon Musk quipped, in a few years this thing will move so fast you’ll need a strobe to see it. It’s not subject to the human reaction time or mechanical constraints.
It could use spikes and/or go on all fours in “fast” mode. It’s whatever you design. My main point though is not mechanics, but the significantly lower reaction time. Given enough compute, the world that seems “real time” to us could appear to be slow as molasses to a robot. I think the natural thing to do would be to make it move at the speed that provides a good balance between accomplishing objectives and energy consumption. I think that this speed is much faster than what we’re used to with humans. For eg military robots that balance could be further tweaked in favor of quickly accomplishing objectives.
Exciting and scary! We live in the time where this if finally a real thing after almost a century of discussion of humanoid robots. I wonder when / if this will become a real commercial thing.
For me the exciting part died out with the understanding of how locomotion actually works. Now it's almost a solved problem, only requiring some hardware advantages and a lot of (excruciatingly boring) man-hours to implement.
So I'm only left with the scary part. This will hit the streets in less than 5 years. Things are going the exact opposite direction of where they should be for the deployment of such robots to be beneficial to the masses. I don't like this, and I'm not alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAmfJgqw3oU