There’s something unsettling about a private firm making powerful autonomous machines – but what’s scarier is who’s building them, and why

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/10/hyena-robots-marketing-boston-dynamics

Bootstrapping the narrative of robot apocalypse into discourse about real technology pervades the discourse of hi-tech. Elon Musk talks endlessly of the singularity; even the more measured Sundar Pichai anthropomorphizes AI. Ultimately, this distracts us from thinking about digital infrastructures built out of unaccountable practices. It makes it harder for us to think through complex cases, like when Uber’s self-driving car hit a pedestrian. As recent documents show, this had nothing to do with the robot car and everything to do with shoddy engineering and a bad safety culture.

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