A Revolution in the Making: 3D Printing, Robots and the Future by Guy Rundle

Author:Guy Rundle [Rundle, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press
Published: 2014-06-25T03:00:00+00:00

BigDog

Robotics and the Utopian

or Dystopian Future

The terrain is rough, autumn in New England, orange leaves thick on a steep hill. The creature struggles with a heavy pack, all four legs straining away, making its way upwards, threading through the trees. At the plateau, someone gives it a swift kick in the side, and it tumbles sideways, staggering, pivoting, compensating for the blow, one leg crossing back across the other, balletic, elegant. Balanced again, the creature would, to assess its surroundings, hold its head up – if it had a head. Instead there’s just a space where that should be, because the creature is a ‘BigDog’ robot, symmetrical in either direction, designed to mimic the motion, balance and fluidity of an animal, with the relentlessness of a machine.

The BigDog can move across just about any terrain, and it’s part of a family – the Cheetah, the LittleDog – designed in the spirit of robotics’ big idea of the millennium: that robots should neither be ever-more precise versions of blocky, mute machines (i.e. supercars) nor necessarily mimic the human shape, which has fairly specific applications and limits. They should instead use all the mechanics of nature, both imitated and recombined, to get past any number of technical impasses. The result, with something like the BigDog, is bizarre to behold, both beautiful and eerie, at once like an animal, vivomorphic, but also very different. When, in the demonstration video (available on YouTube), a worker gives the machine a hard kick and it staggers, our emotions are inevitably engaged – such that one would want to say it was kicked ‘harshly’ or ‘roughly’.

It is a stunning new insertion of technology into our lives, it is a triumph of the engineer’s art – and, of course, it is military-funded, developed under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program. From those great folks who gave you the internet, here’s a machine that could hunt you down and kill you across the breadth of a continent. Boston Dynamics, developed out of the tech web around MIT, blossomed under the massive investments of DARPA money – as did dozens of start-ups in the area – and now they’re coming home.

In 2013 Boston Dynamics, together with eight other corporations, was purchased by Google for an undisclosed sum, because why not? Why wouldn’t a search engine company want a robot army? It’s a measure of how far we’re into this new world that subsequent announcements from the Googleplex about new acquisitions – Acme Death Ray of Omaha etc. – barely raise a murmur. When Facebook announced in April 2014 that it was buying a drone start-up, there was bemusement, but of a very specific type. Why would Faceboook need a killer technology firm? the question went. It’s not as if they’re Google.

Killer technology – killer smart, killer new, killer killer. If the rise of 3D printing and additive manufacturing has brought forth a wave of utopian thinking – ways in which new technology could be distributed, democratised, self-printing printers turning

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