Spot is the $74,500 robot dog of our dystopian dreams
See Spot run.
Run, Spot, run.
See Spot spook the living daylights out of Dick and Jane and you and many others who watch him in all his robotic glory.
Spot is a very undoggy agile mobile robot with a decidedly doggy name. Created by Boston Dynamics, Spot performs clever and highly resourceful tasks that put Lassie to shame. A recent dance video has been seen almost 2 million times; Spot’s 2019 launch video has been viewed nearly 12 million times.
They show what appears to be a very good robot but a spectacularly unsmoochy pooch, less a source of emotional support and more the stuff of dystopian dreams — the sort that might have one screaming “Out, damned Spot!”
“lol it’s definitely a future killing machine,” quipped one commenter on the Boston Dynamics Instagram feed.
“OMG MAKE IT STOP!!!” another wrote in response to a video from a 2019 tech conference where Spot is swooned over like a lost Hadid sister.
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“Nice thing! Spot the robot dog. Cute in an interesting way. Nightmare fuel, actually,” tweeted another wag.
Spot has no spots, and sells for $75,400, though one can be leased for less. He/it/whatever is sheathed in a bilious hazmat yellow and sports four arachnid legs that gambol like an over-caffeinated member of a marching band. Its “face” is a yellow-and-black rectangle that invokes visions of the dark night of the soul.
Spot makes limited noise. The legs whir like a washing machine’s wash cycle. It is all byte and no bark.
The canine robot is designed to explore remote and hazardous environments, places where sentient, sober humans fear to tread. More than 400 are in use, according to a March “60 Minutes” report, to assist mining, utilities, oil, gas and construction companies, as well as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and various police departments.
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(Boston Dynamics was emailed multiple times for comment. Unlike Spot, the media department would not fetch. An actual human answered the phone explaining that it might take a couple of weeks for a response.)
Why is a robotic dog frightening to so many? Possibly because the Venn diagram intersection of robots and dogs remains whippet slim. Humans are irrational about both. Also, entirely reductive. Robots = Terrifying. Dogs = Goodness incarnate.
Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, a monster of man’s own making, is more than 200 years old, a response to the threat of the industrial revolution that machines might well replace us, making human existence seem utterly disposable and meaningless. The term “robot” is a century old, dating to Czech writer Karel Capek’s science-fiction play “R.U.R.,” in English short for “Rossum’s Universal Robots.”
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How does the drama end? Not well.
Robots in our collective imagination have tended toward menace, rapacious will and allegiance to none. With few exceptions (C-3PO, R2-D2, the Jetsons’ aproned Rosey), robots in popular culture tend to be Terminators possessed with the soul of HAL 9000.
Whereas our affection for dogs is overly sentimental, resulting in a fathomless ocean of slobbery drool. We never fear dogs will replace us. We believe they’re here to comfort and adore us unconditionally, despite what some have done to mail carriers. Spot challenges us to hold two opposing thoughts in one $74,500 place.
“To give this robot a dog name and call it Spot, leaning in on the doggyness, is problematic in some ways,” says Ed Finn, founding director of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, adding, “We want total control and dominion over dogs. Spot is not going to do the things that a dog does.”
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Spot, with a top speed of three mph, will never be confused with Clifford, Beethoven or Wasabi, the bewildering puddle of fur that conquered this year’s Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.
Share this articleShareStill, Spot is a gifted hoofer and roboinfluencer. In one video, seven Spots dance to BTS’s “IONIQ: I’m On It,” a ditty that promotes an electric vehicle by Hyundai, which owns a controlling interest in Boston Dynamics. In another, the robot mixes margaritas in a blender.
Spot won’t be able to do all canine tasks. “The public is very quick to imagine all sorts of things a robot can do that it can’t really do,” says Howie Choset, co-director of Carnegie Mellon’s Biorobotics Lab. “I think there’s a misperception of robots taking jobs away from people. Robots are tools. Throughout time, tools have increased the productivity of people.”
Perhaps dog people fear that Spot challenges the massive hold that dogs occupy in their lives, the concept of them as faithful beasts, and poses the idea that pets are merely a projection of evanescent hope that can be substituted by an assemblage of motors, wires and sensors and remain a cause for good.
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“We have this very complicated relationship with robots. We want to play God and be the parents of these new creations, but we also feel threatened by them. We don’t want them to be too much like us,” says Finn. Or our hounds.
“The bad robot is a trope, a nightmare we tell ourselves because it’s about our fears and anxiety about being replaced,” Finn says. “We need metaphors to deal with these new systems. We live our culture through stories.” Engineers keep endowing robots with human or now canine characteristics. Yet Spot, currently without snout or soulful eyes, appears utterly alien and hardly a potential best pal.
For three decades, Choset has worked on other animal-inspired robots. His happen to imitate snakes, and are used for search-and-rescue, surgery and airplane assembly. In 2017, on “The Tonight Show,” he brought a robotic snake that crawled up Jimmy Fallon’s leg.
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Robotic snakes seem more fitting, and Choset doesn’t name them. Plenty of people are uneasy around snakes, including Choset. Which is why, paradoxically, “I’m not afraid of my snake robots. I never thought of snakes and snake robots as the same thing,” he says.
We shouldn’t fear Spot, either, Choset cautions. “Spot is a wonderful robot. It does really great things,” he says. “And it’s not going to take over the world.”
Or, most likely, our hearts.
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