I finally saw the movie completely....it won't go on my must watch list, though I do like John David Washington as an actor. To me it had Chappie vibes like DJ said and A.I. movie vibes mixed with Star Wars, BSG, Replica and Archive movies.

To me the most ridiculous part was, as an American, that if WE were attacked, we would only build ONE weapon system  Come-on now, lol 1?

I would not dismiss the emotional humanized part of the movie.  I'm not drawn to building an emotional robot; but they might need to understand emotions of humans and they might mimic them.  Some researchers think our emotions are tied to our learning processes and may be necessary to integrate with AI.

I suppose at the very least AI would need to understand emotions if our human minds are to be replicated in the machine world. Speaking of that.... who else thinks those walking barrel robots that went KABOOM were people's minds replicated in machine form?

Dave, you are right, the movie was a little disturbing, but it had some very sweet moments too, a bit like the movie A.I.

Ah, that's interesting. So, do you think the AI uses emotions as a weapon against humans? By playing with our heartstrings, we'll hesitate before killing them. I can see why they would program emotion simulation then.

I've been trying to find other robot/AI movies. We should create a list of stuff to suggest to each other. I'd be interested if there's anything I haven't seen yet or would want to see again because I forgot about it.

I enjoyed I Robot (the movie not the now floundering vacuum cleaner company) although I do love an episode of battle bots. Shame they are not autonomous. Two Teslas in a death match kind of thing.  When my kids were young they enjoyed a head to head match with the flipper robots.  I guess we could add some smarts to one and do a human controlled vs A1 robot challenge.

I like the way you think with human vs ai robot challenge. But it would surely begin the divide against human and ai hahaha!

Let’s talk about the floundering robot vacuum company iRobot for a minute

im not surprised they’re struggling financially. You can’t expect to make a single product that increases its price over its lifetime. That defies economics.

iRobot paved the waters for a household robot vacuum, which is a glorified bumper car. China and a million other companies jumped on the bandwagon with lower cost alternatives. Some alternatives provided better or matching performance for much less money.

but iRobot thought they were some classy version and ppl would pay extra for the name. That may be true for 1% of the vacuum cleaner customer. But it isn’t sustainable. At least not with a hardware AND software team.

if they offered a monthly subscription, maybe that would have saved them. But the subscription would need to be worthwhile. The only feature I can imagine is a subscription where an operator gets the robot unstuck for you. But there’s privacy invasive because someone’s watching you. And they worked so hard at adding sensor tech to avoid getting stuck, even though it still does.

iRobot isn’t the only robot company to experience this same situation. There’s dozens and dozens of robot companies in the past run by CEO’s who were clearly engineers and had no grasp of economics. Baxter, misty, so many.

its easy to price yourself out of business when you base the price on ego.

iRobot have a robust reliable platform and apart from pricing themselves out of the market what they lack is innovation and the ability to branch into new lines of business.  They should have been using this platform in other industries like warehouse moving packing shelves around like Amazons bots, adding shelves for restaurant table deliveries, hotel room deliveries etc.  A fairly simple addon and it could be draining the engine oil in your car, performing airplane safety inspections, security monitoring for commercial buildings  hopefully the new CEO is prepared to take risks and not just launch another vacuum cleaner.

I agree it's a robust and reliable platform for its use case. I believe they haven't entered those other markets because their platform isn't reliable enough when it isn't a vacuum. Consider these two points...

1. A customer comes home to find their vacuum stopped at the top of stairs, or stuck with a sock hanging out of its mouth. The customer is frustrated but forgiving enough to put it back on the charger and carry on with their day.

2. When a robot in business is meant to replace a human, the expectation of the company is they no longer need to pay a person.

The latter is not possible, yet. Companies are not eager to purchase a robot for anything other than marketing - to showcase they're "high-tech." The fact is, even the simple restaurant or hotel delivery robot needs humans around to assist. So, if a company is to purchase a robot to replace humans but needs humans, the simple answer is that they won't bother buying a robot.

The point of the exosphere was to solve the "last-mile" challenges of robotics with a call center of humans. That way, the humans are outside the organization and only need to be involved when there's a single incident to recover the robot's operation remotely. In all financial models, it makes sense - and it will happen at a broader scale in the future. Exosphere is just ahead of its time - because even with human assistance, no intelligent company wants to be the first to employ robots.

Of course, you can post the McDonald's that put a robot in the kitchen. Or a hotel that tried using a robot. The fact is, there are articles about experiments but nothing mainstream. Or some new or old article, all saying the same thing... drones are coming! robots are coming! blah blah blah... when you consider power consumption, onboard processing limitations, uncanny valleys, lack of programmers, lack of onsite support, and a million other reasons... we know why robots aren't replacing humans. Okay, sure, you're going to send an article about some Chinese company that says the same thing as every other Chinese company: "We have robots, and they'll be replacing humans in a year." Oh, how short our human memories are when we forget this has happened every year since 1970.

iRobot technology is a vacuum; they have no industry pressure to be anything else.

We're all in this space together. There's some very high-tech sensory and navigational processing stuff being done by NVidia and others. While some users here, for example, are crying to test it out... my answer is that if it's not modular enough to be integrated into products like ARC or requires a Ph.D. to implement it, it's not long-lasting. Synthiam integrates technologies that matter, not ones that make you bleed.

That being said, iRobot is similar and has been. Anyone can talk about their lidar, but no one cares because it is a user-feedback-app gimmick. The products still depend on bouncing around the room like a ping-pong ball. The lidar can "sort of" get my Roomba into the room/area of the charger beacon. But that's about it.

Oh, one more thing since I'm typie-McGee right now.

Look at this...

I saw that earlier this morning, and wow - it made me think about the recent iRobot news. For $140, even with SLAM navigation.

Sorry, iRobot, but your $899 CAD vacuum tech from 2007 should cost $140 or less since you have such a high-volume product.

Right on DJ!!!

"Synthiam integrates technologies that matter, not ones that make you bleed" - I want to 3d print that on a plaque, that was awesome!  I picture you saying that like Jesse Venture in the movie Predator "I ain't got time to bleed."  Really great insight into home consumer vs. business when it comes to robots.

So, do you think the AI uses emotions as a weapon against humans?

I think that is one possibility.  I know I've read a few articles about teaching robots to lie, cheat and deceive and those experiments were super interesting because the deceptive robots were more successful at their tasks if they were alone in 1on1 competition.  Teams of robots seems to fair better if they were programmed to NOT be deceptive and to help one another.  Interesting dynamics at play for sure.

I've also read a few AI articles that theorize for AI to get the next level in cognition they will need a form of emotions to aid in learning and memory management.  My takeaway was the theory always points back to the human mind being the pinnacle of computation efficiency and emotions are embedded into so many of the human mind's processes - that to replicate that AI will need emotions.  I find the articles interesting to read but I'm not sure I agree.