
Stop Robot Abuse - agonzalezro
http://stoprobotabuse.com/
======
gnu8
This is is supposed to be a feel-good public relations campaign to enhance
Google aubsidiary Boston Dynamics' reputation. The reason they need to do that
is because one day these machines will be used against humans. They will
oppress and they will kill. Unfortunately science fiction has made it almost
impossible for people to consider this issue with the gravity it requires.

~~~
rckclmbr
Not sure if you're serious or not, but the domain is owned by Jelmer Tiete,
who doesn't appear to have any affiliation with Boston Dynamics. He works at
beyond.io, which on their homepage says they "make things that make you
smile". I think he did just that.

~~~
bhayden
The website is pretty obviously made to sell tshirts. It's already made a few
hundred dollars by the looks of it.

------
kaoD
This one is disgusting
[http://stoprobotabuse.com/images/gif9.mp4](http://stoprobotabuse.com/images/gif9.mp4)

He's patting the robot, not pushing him. See? This is all that's wrong with
robot-rights activists. They take everything personally and try to manipulate
public opinion (whether intentionally or subconsciously, seeing harm where
there isn't).

In fact I think the robot is knowingly feigning to get the human punished. I'd
totally sue him.

~~~
autechr3
That robot would make a good pro footballer.

------
72deluxe
But is the website being served by a computer that is essentially a robot in
servitude?

The hypocrisy is eye-watering.

And won't someone spare a thought for all the routers and switches and
shackled nodes that the data had to pass through to reach your screen.

~~~
derefr
Nah, single-task switches and servers are more like electronic plants/fungi
than electronic animals.

To be serious: insofar as these robots reorder their subgoals to avoid "pain",
PETA might really care one day, at least as much as they care about, say,
jellyfish or coral, which are by all measures less sensate. But even under
that kind of expanded criterion, an HTTP daemon that just goes on executing to
send you a webpage whether its CPU is at 0% or 100% load doesn't qualify.

(On the other hand, one might consider such units as "cells" in a greater
being; if that greater being is a system architecture with health-checks and
load-balancers and so forth, then it could express goal-orientation, pain
avoidance, etc., even though its subcomponents do not.)

------
DonHopkins
Back in 2003 at the Stupid Fun Club, I helped Will Wright make these hidden
camera one minute movies about robots roaming the streets and restaurants of
Oakland and having their feelings hurt:

Empathy:
[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Empathy.mpg](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Empathy.mpg)

Servitude:
[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Servitude.mpg](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Servitude.mpg)

One Minute Movies:
[http://www.allentownproductions.com/project.php?p=nbc](http://www.allentownproductions.com/project.php?p=nbc)

Edit: oops, fixed the mpg links -- sorry!

~~~
542458
404 on those first two links, I'm afraid.

~~~
DonHopkins
Oops sorry! Fixed the links.

This is Slats, the robot waiter, roaming the streets of Berkeley:

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats1.jpg](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats1.jpg)

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats2.jpg](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats2.jpg)

[http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats3.jpg](http://www.donhopkins.com/home/RobotMovies/Slats3.jpg)

After a short and unsuccessful career as a waiter, Slats eventually decided
that his one true goal in life was to reproduce himself.

So we took him out in public around Berkeley, and shot some video of Slats
attempting to seduce men and women off the street.

It was kind of like Speed Dating meets Demon Seed: he tried to talk people
into giving him their eggs and sperm, because he needed their genetic material
to reproduce himself.

The results of our research: It turns out to be a lot easier for a robot to
talk a man out of his sperm, than to talk a woman out of her eggs.

------
tlb
Back in the pre-civil-robot-rights era, I committed various such acts, such as
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCEZhxFa8Bk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCEZhxFa8Bk)

~~~
DonHopkins
He's certainly physically stable, but is he mentally stable?

------
jrochkind1
I gotta say, I find those four-legged robots terrifying, because I know the
first use of them is going to be for police/military/security-forces to use
them to attack us.

~~~
lione
More like as robotic pack mules. Or search and rescue. I doubt that sticking
some guns on them is gonna be the most effective use.

~~~
jrochkind1
They don't need guns to be used to attack, any more than actual live dogs do.
They've got significantly more weapon choices (in addition to themselves) than
live dogs though, not limited to ordinary firearms. (tasers? mortar of some
kind? Something they'll invent just for it?)

Indeed they are talking about them for cargo and search and rescue. It's a lot
less scary to talk about that. We could make a pool on how long it'll take
until they are talking about them as "crowd control" or military
'neutralization'. I'd say 5 years would be generous.

~~~
lione
I'm just saying, if they want to use a robot to attack you, they have a lot
better option then these. The basic design heavily supports cargo/search and
rescue. They aren't gonna use them as killbots, when they grossly underperform
and outcost other lethal/nonlethal options. As a pack mule? Not gonna get shot
at or damaged, and performs the job as good or better as an animal. As search
and rescue? Can go into unstable/dangerous areas without a cost of human life,
plus can probably outperform in some basic aspects in terms of
sensing/strength/stability. For killing? Not like we don't have 10,000 other
ways of killing or stopping people that don't outperform it and still carry
little risk to humans.

------
ta_53710F1
Disgusting. What's next, letting them vote?

~~~
higherpurpose
Or worse, letting them get married. The Republicans have warned us this would
happen.

~~~
IgorPartola
Worse. You'll probably be forced to marry to dog-robot of the same sex as you.
This slippery slope is so steep!

------
01Michael10
Not the start of another politically correct movement! I got up from my desk
and kicked our R2 unit, just because...

------
IgorPartola
I feel like a this is a recipe for making some serious spare change: good idea
+ good design skills + site that sells T-shirts. I remember reading about the
person who set up the "I survived the Snowpocalipse" T-shirt site a couple of
years back and made a decent amount of money off it.

------
jkot
Does that include bio robots?
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXI4WWhPn-U](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXI4WWhPn-U)

------
browep
meh, call me when you get Sarah McLachlan to sing over it.

------
thrillgore
This is another example of where great copy is what really matters on the web.
I love it.

------
peterwwillis
Seriously though, stop animal abuse. That includes yelling at your pets.
They're not robots and they don't speak english. It really bothers me when
people who bring animals into the workplace treat them badly.

~~~
spacemanmatt
Some people actually draw parallels between robot abuse and animal abuse, for
reasons I do not know. And some of them take robot abuse seriously, as a proxy
for animal or people abuse.

------
miket
We wholeheartedly support this cause at Diffbot!
[http://www.diffbot.com/robots.txt](http://www.diffbot.com/robots.txt)

------
cryptoz
Just wait until the DeepMind section of Google starts to watch the Boston
Dynamics videos. What will happen when Google's AI knows that Google employees
kick and smack other Google robots around?

Sure, it's a silly example right now in 2015, but just wait until 2020 when
the examples won't be silly at all. This is a real fear - I think it's almost
a certainty that there will be hundreds of videos showing violence against
robots posted online. And this could very well be the reason that the robots
decide to rise up against us.

Sure, not the 2015 "Spot". But just wait.

------
beefman
Page layout is broken on Firefox (paragraph wrapping the two shirt images is
apparently missing style attributes).

------
Aardwolf
The videos don't work (firefox on linux)

------
danielmiessler
When they can experience happiness and suffering, that's when we should care.
Animals apply, robots don't.

Yet.

~~~
philh
Although I find it interesting that in a future that probably won't happen,
campaigns like this may become necessary. We're predicting our future moral
failings, and using them as satire.

------
jbrooksuk
Is it weird that I kept expecting the robots to turn around and destroy?

Too much Doctor Who for me.

