I just don't see what the point of this technology even is.
I'm having a hard time even understanding your question - what do you mean, what is the point? I can understand if this is a total epiphany for you, but that this has been the moral quandary for zoos for quite some time. especially aquariums. Especially where you take highly intelligent animals from environments where they're used to ranging hundreds or thousands of miles and confine them pools.
The point of the zoo or the aquarium is that there's an actual animal, that lives and breathes and has some semblance of independence and free will to act as it wishes (within the context of the zoo, admittedly). It's real.
This isn't an animal. It's a robot. It's fundamentally not real.
I agree that intelligent animals should not be kept in captivity. But the solution to that is not to put in robots and act like it's the same thing.
I think the educational difference between a living creature and an almost perfect facsimile are essentially nonexistent.
Adding in the increased opportunities for interaction with the facsimiles I think they come out ahead.
The real things can be viewed on screens in their natural habitats.
I disagree entirely.
Would you also contend that the Natural History Museum is a poor substitute for a Zoo?
Although I guess there could be something to be said for the educational and olfactory experience of being downwind of an animal spontaneously evacuating it’s bowels.
I just don't see what the point of this technology even is.
I'm having a hard time even understanding your question - what do you mean, what is the point? I can understand if this is a total epiphany for you, but that this has been the moral quandary for zoos for quite some time. especially aquariums. Especially where you take highly intelligent animals from environments where they're used to ranging hundreds or thousands of miles and confine them pools.
The point of the zoo or the aquarium is that there's an actual animal, that lives and breathes and has some semblance of independence and free will to act as it wishes (within the context of the zoo, admittedly). It's real.
This isn't an animal. It's a robot. It's fundamentally not real.
I agree that intelligent animals should not be kept in captivity. But the solution to that is not to put in robots and act like it's the same thing.
I think the educational difference between a living creature and an almost perfect facsimile are essentially nonexistent.
Adding in the increased opportunities for interaction with the facsimiles I think they come out ahead.
The real things can be viewed on screens in their natural habitats.
I disagree entirely.
Would you also contend that the Natural History Museum is a poor substitute for a Zoo?
I would contend that they are fundamentally different things. A robot dolphin could make sense in the former context, and is antithetical to the latter.
Maybe I should have made this more clear in my first post on this. My view is that appeal of a zoo is the opportunity to interact with, or at least observe, actual non-human, living creatures, behaving according to their biological programming. A human controlled simulacrum isn't even an AI acting like a dolphin. It's a a costume. It's Disney. It's a fundamentally un-like thing.
If an animal is too intelligent* to be kept in captivity, then go see it in the wild. Go whale watching some time. There are a fucking shitload of dolphins. If it's too rare or too sensitive to be reasonably encountered in the wild, then watch some Attenborough.
If it's a dinosaur, then do whatever, I don't care.
*obviously this definition is critical to the discussion, but outside the context of the argument we're having here.
My interest in that would be to marvel at technology, but it would in no way substitute for the feeling of interacting with an animal*
*assuming said animal interactions are ethical
If the animal hasn’t been domesticated, and thus reliant on humans for its welfare, then chances are it isn’t ethical to be imprisoning it.
So for humane animal interaction you have pretty much the entirety of farmyard livestock, with some interesting imported livestock.
Less humane would be the apex predators and other top of the food chain creatures both land based and sea based.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the barnacle probably doesn't give a fuck if it's in the open ocean or a tank.
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AbsalonLands of Always WinterRegistered Userregular
edited June 2020
Could someone provide or link to a solid, expert take on the Three Gorges Dam and its likelihood of collapsing (some expert recently commented that there is a risk of that)? Because that feels like a potential millennia-defining disaster, like Yellowstone erupting.
I don't care about robot dolphins. Give me the life size mosasaur exhibit!
or go swimming with a realistic Great White robot.
Which is still something I'd like to do at some point. Though in a shark cage out in the open ocean with a real one.
destroyah87 on
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
And this is like, phase 1 of testing out this technology when it's limited to control by a guy on the edge of a pool.
Such range and control is still sci-fi stuff, but you could do things like make one that blends in with the sharks that live in the middle of the deep water pacific, some of the most barren and desolate environments on the planet (which is why they're kind of hard to study).
Could someone provide or link to a solid, expert take on the Three Gorges Dam and its likelihood of collapsing (some expert recently commented that there is a risk of that)? Because that feels like a potential millennia-defining disaster, like Yellowstone erupting.
If it's true, China is hushing it up quite well. And unfortunately it's something very easy to hush up until it very suddenly can't be anymore.
The hydrologist who is being named, Wang Weiluo, has either claimed the dam is about to fail after every significant rainfall or western media keeps dredging up the time he did after every heavy rain. Water is past the warning stage, but it's been higher a number of times. It hasn't yet reached the spillways and they haven't opened the drains fully yet, and the government people who run it have shown they have no real problem opening everything up without warning or consideration of the downriver human costs.
Even if it were deficient it's not a very old dam. Dam failures tend to be all at once very early or slowly with all too much warning along the way.
I just don't see what the point of this technology even is.
I'm having a hard time even understanding your question - what do you mean, what is the point? I can understand if this is a total epiphany for you, but that this has been the moral quandary for zoos for quite some time. especially aquariums. Especially where you take highly intelligent animals from environments where they're used to ranging hundreds or thousands of miles and confine them pools.
The point of the zoo or the aquarium is that there's an actual animal, that lives and breathes and has some semblance of independence and free will to act as it wishes (within the context of the zoo, admittedly). It's real.
This isn't an animal. It's a robot. It's fundamentally not real.
I agree that intelligent animals should not be kept in captivity. But the solution to that is not to put in robots and act like it's the same thing.
I think the educational difference between a living creature and an almost perfect facsimile are essentially nonexistent.
Adding in the increased opportunities for interaction with the facsimiles I think they come out ahead.
The real things can be viewed on screens in their natural habitats.
I disagree entirely.
Would you also contend that the Natural History Museum is a poor substitute for a Zoo?
I would contend that they are fundamentally different things. A robot dolphin could make sense in the former context, and is antithetical to the latter.
Maybe I should have made this more clear in my first post on this. My view is that appeal of a zoo is the opportunity to interact with, or at least observe, actual non-human, living creatures, behaving according to their biological programming. A human controlled simulacrum isn't even an AI acting like a dolphin. It's a a costume. It's Disney. It's a fundamentally un-like thing.
If an animal is too intelligent* to be kept in captivity, then go see it in the wild. Go whale watching some time. There are a fucking shitload of dolphins. If it's too rare or too sensitive to be reasonably encountered in the wild, then watch some Attenborough.
If it's a dinosaur, then do whatever, I don't care.
*obviously this definition is critical to the discussion, but outside the context of the argument we're having here.
I saw my first (and only) orca show as a teen. The main education I took from the experience was how obviously wrong it was. As awe-inspiring as it was to see the whale up close and see how big it was, and how incredibly powerful, it wasn't worth it. I came away feeling soul-sick. I felt like I'd committed violence.
There are still ethical ways to interact with live dolphins, both in the wild and in captivity. The Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, for example, keeps only animals that either were born there,* or have been rescued (from other facilities or from injuries sustained in the wild) and cannot be released. They do shows and interactive experiences to raise money, but their first priority is the wellbeing of their residents, and it shows. They also actually do a lot of research on dolphin intelligence and society. (Last time I was there, in 2014, they were looking into object permanence. Turns out that although dolphins will, for example, hide things and remember where they hid them, they don't seem to understand containers - e.g., they're terrible at the shell game. The write up speculated that maybe it's because containers aren't really a thing in the ocean :razz: )
*Personally I'm not comfortable with allowing dolphins to breed in captivity either, but I'll concede it's a gray area.
Most dolphin/whale shows aren't educational; they're just spectacle. An opportunity to see (and maybe touch) an exotic creature up close. Sea World is famously awful for its resident cetaceans; and many places that have captive dolphins on display aren't Sea World - they're much worse.
I don't think dolphin shows are going to go away - they just make too much money. If animatronics can become an attractive (read: cheaper) alternative for unethical operators, so much the better.
For zoos and so forth, if large animal exhibits were replaced with realistic animatronics with very clear explanations that the animals aren't real (because that would be cruel), but they're bleeding-edge realistic, I think people would adjust. The difference between seeing footage of, for example, elephants and seeing elephants in the flesh is mostly a sense of size, presence, and sheer mass. Animatronics could give you that. The only thing a real animal has that a robot doesn't is a mind; and if you can't keep the mind without harming it, it's not representative of the wild animal anyway. Zoos would still be able to offer experiences you can't get anywhere else (even in VR), without the cost, difficulty, and ethical concerns of keeping animals that really shouldn't be kept.
There are other applications, too. Animal performers in films could be replaced with animatronics, for example. No matter how good CG gets, practical effects still hold up better over time.
From a darker perspective, if we learn how to make hyper-realistic robot animals now, we'll still have them - for educational purposes - when the animals themselves are gone.
...as an aside, I would love to see the internals of that dolphinbot!
edit: the video doesn't mention it, but this is incredibly cool!
Roger previously told Radio New Zealand that the real magic lies in the dolphin’s anatomical engineering: This dolphin weighs, feels and has been engineered to simulate everything from the skeletal structure, to the muscular interaction with that skeletal structure, to the fat bladders and weight deposits on a real adolescent bottlenose dolphin." This has helped captivate many people, including an enthralled, non-verbal child with autism who became “astonishingly focused.
I mean, the blowhole, obviously. It's an educational dolphin built to mimic, it's gotta refill just like a real dolphin. Now, are you going to answer questions with questions, or are you gonna give up the deets on the robodolphin dick?
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I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
Could someone provide or link to a solid, expert take on the Three Gorges Dam and its likelihood of collapsing (some expert recently commented that there is a risk of that)? Because that feels like a potential millennia-defining disaster, like Yellowstone erupting.
If it's true, China is hushing it up quite well. And unfortunately it's something very easy to hush up until it very suddenly can't be anymore.
The hydrologist who is being named, Wang Weiluo, has either claimed the dam is about to fail after every significant rainfall or western media keeps dredging up the time he did after every heavy rain. Water is past the warning stage, but it's been higher a number of times. It hasn't yet reached the spillways and they haven't opened the drains fully yet, and the government people who run it have shown they have no real problem opening everything up without warning or consideration of the downriver human costs.
Even if it were deficient it's not a very old dam. Dam failures tend to be all at once very early or slowly with all too much warning along the way.
Folks have been claiming that a Three Gorges failure is imminent pretty much since it was built. I remember it being a big topic in high school debate the year the topic was Chinese relations.
I just don't see what the point of this technology even is.
I'm having a hard time even understanding your question - what do you mean, what is the point? I can understand if this is a total epiphany for you, but that this has been the moral quandary for zoos for quite some time. especially aquariums. Especially where you take highly intelligent animals from environments where they're used to ranging hundreds or thousands of miles and confine them pools.
The point of the zoo or the aquarium is that there's an actual animal, that lives and breathes and has some semblance of independence and free will to act as it wishes (within the context of the zoo, admittedly). It's real.
This isn't an animal. It's a robot. It's fundamentally not real.
I agree that intelligent animals should not be kept in captivity. But the solution to that is not to put in robots and act like it's the same thing.
I think the educational difference between a living creature and an almost perfect facsimile are essentially nonexistent.
Adding in the increased opportunities for interaction with the facsimiles I think they come out ahead.
The real things can be viewed on screens in their natural habitats.
I disagree entirely.
Would you also contend that the Natural History Museum is a poor substitute for a Zoo?
I would contend that they are fundamentally different things. A robot dolphin could make sense in the former context, and is antithetical to the latter.
Maybe I should have made this more clear in my first post on this. My view is that appeal of a zoo is the opportunity to interact with, or at least observe, actual non-human, living creatures, behaving according to their biological programming. A human controlled simulacrum isn't even an AI acting like a dolphin. It's a a costume. It's Disney. It's a fundamentally un-like thing.
If an animal is too intelligent* to be kept in captivity, then go see it in the wild. Go whale watching some time. There are a fucking shitload of dolphins. If it's too rare or too sensitive to be reasonably encountered in the wild, then watch some Attenborough.
If it's a dinosaur, then do whatever, I don't care.
*obviously this definition is critical to the discussion, but outside the context of the argument we're having here.
The bolded part is where it falls apart.
No one viewing animals in a zoo is watching them behaving according to their biological programming.
They are at best watching them interact with in environment that is alien and thus counteractive to them behaving according to their biological programming.
Zoos are and always have been and always will be bullshit when it comes to observing animals behaving as they would in nature.
I'm certainly not going to assert that interacting with robo-animals is better for seeing that but since it could theoretically allow for fewer animals being placed in shitty facsimiles of their natural habitat?
Yeah I'm on board.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited June 2020
Replacing animals with robots would kill the one of the only solid reason zoos still exist: getting kids connected to and interested in animals so they will grow up fighting to keep them from going extinct. Kids aren't stupid. The really young ones may not get that the animals are fake, but it's definitely going to matter when they get over 5-7 years old and understand it's a sham. They'll probably still be impressed, but they'll be impressed with robotics, not animals. Disconnecting kids from seeing real animals is the perfect opening for sleazy types to get all sorts of habitats wiped out once people grow up without ever having gotten to make these personal connections to these critters in person and thus simply don't grow up paying attention to what's happening to those places.
And the kinds of zoos that are truly horrible for animals are the kinds of zoos which would also never pay for an expensive robot animal and an operator to pretend to be an animal, so that's not going to fix anything.
The tech sounds interesting as hell for making fake theme parks about extinct animals, though, and supplementing existing zoos with demos of being up close to an animal. Kids going to the zoo to see a grizzly bear would be a hell of a lot more impressed by seeing a live one and then getting to get close to a fake one to see just how huge they can be.
I could even see there being a point to having a few "exhibitless" zoos where the "animals" are just walking around for people to interact with, but no way do I see this as an effective wholesale replacement of zoos everywhere. Seeing a fake polar bear simply isn't the same experience as seeing an actual living, thinking one on the other side of some glass.
Zoos are pretty crucial to the population of endangered wildlife. It really sucks that these animals have to spend their lives in tiny enclosures but for a lot of them the alternative is death, often at the hands of a human. Plus a lot of zoos donate some of their income to conservation funds and projects. I guess it comes down to the one vs many problem. If one living dolphin can help motivate people to care enough to save thousands is that worth it? I don't actually know if there is any research to backup the idea that it does help motivate people, just a gut feeling.
I'm ok with most animals in zoos. They may not be living in their natural environment, but with care and enrichment they can be happy and healthy living in a zoo.
Marine mammals can't. Its straight up fucking cruel, like trapping a human in solitary for the rest of their lives. These animals are just too smart and designed to range too far to take it in most cases. They often go crazy, die, or kill. So I'm all for orca robots.
Before following any advice, opinions, or thoughts I may have expressed in the above post, be warned: I found Keven Costners "Waterworld" to be a very entertaining film.
I mean, the blowhole, obviously. It's an educational dolphin built to mimic, it's gotta refill just like a real dolphin. Now, are you going to answer questions with questions, or are you gonna give up the deets on the robodolphin dick?
All the animals in Robot Park are female. We know robots can't breed but we've seen enough movies and we aren't taking chances.
I mean, the blowhole, obviously. It's an educational dolphin built to mimic, it's gotta refill just like a real dolphin. Now, are you going to answer questions with questions, or are you gonna give up the deets on the robodolphin dick?
All the animals in Robot Park are female. We know robots can't breed but we've seen enough movies and we aren't taking chances.
"You don't let them breed, but you let them repair. What if they 'repair' something new?"
*dramatic sting as all the clues fall into place*
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
I mean, the blowhole, obviously. It's an educational dolphin built to mimic, it's gotta refill just like a real dolphin. Now, are you going to answer questions with questions, or are you gonna give up the deets on the robodolphin dick?
All the animals in Robot Park are female. We know robots can't breed but we've seen enough movies and we aren't taking chances.
I don't think we're talking robot on robot copulation.
Not if we want to make the real money anyway...
I mean it's still fucking stupid that we have to do a lot of science to convince doctors that not all our physical problems are just "crazy-women-brain, try being less crazy and/or woman"
but the study itself is more nuanced and important.
I mean it's still fucking stupid that we have to do a lot of science to convince doctors that not all our physical problems are just "crazy-women-brain, try being less crazy and/or woman"
but the study itself is more nuanced and important.
I mean it's still fucking stupid that we have to do a lot of science to convince doctors that not all our physical problems are just "crazy-women-brain, try being less crazy and/or woman"
but the study itself is more nuanced and important.
Replacing animals with robots would kill the one of the only solid reason zoos still exist: getting kids connected to and interested in animals so they will grow up fighting to keep them from going extinct. Kids aren't stupid. The really young ones may not get that the animals are fake, but it's definitely going to matter when they get over 5-7 years old and understand it's a sham. They'll probably still be impressed, but they'll be impressed with robotics, not animals. Disconnecting kids from seeing real animals is the perfect opening for sleazy types to get all sorts of habitats wiped out once people grow up without ever having gotten to make these personal connections to these critters in person and thus simply don't grow up paying attention to what's happening to those places.
And the kinds of zoos that are truly horrible for animals are the kinds of zoos which would also never pay for an expensive robot animal and an operator to pretend to be an animal, so that's not going to fix anything.
The tech sounds interesting as hell for making fake theme parks about extinct animals, though, and supplementing existing zoos with demos of being up close to an animal. Kids going to the zoo to see a grizzly bear would be a hell of a lot more impressed by seeing a live one and then getting to get close to a fake one to see just how huge they can be.
I could even see there being a point to having a few "exhibitless" zoos where the "animals" are just walking around for people to interact with, but no way do I see this as an effective wholesale replacement of zoos everywhere. Seeing a fake polar bear simply isn't the same experience as seeing an actual living, thinking one on the other side of some glass.
YMMV, but Nature on PBS did more to get me interested in wildlife as a kid than zoos ever did. Not that zoos aren't cool, but Nature was so much more interesting :razz:
I was a kid for whom most things that claimed to "get kids interested in _______!" fell utterly flat, though. I don't know how typical that is.
Replacing animals with robots would kill the one of the only solid reason zoos still exist: getting kids connected to and interested in animals so they will grow up fighting to keep them from going extinct. Kids aren't stupid. The really young ones may not get that the animals are fake, but it's definitely going to matter when they get over 5-7 years old and understand it's a sham. They'll probably still be impressed, but they'll be impressed with robotics, not animals. Disconnecting kids from seeing real animals is the perfect opening for sleazy types to get all sorts of habitats wiped out once people grow up without ever having gotten to make these personal connections to these critters in person and thus simply don't grow up paying attention to what's happening to those places.
And the kinds of zoos that are truly horrible for animals are the kinds of zoos which would also never pay for an expensive robot animal and an operator to pretend to be an animal, so that's not going to fix anything.
The tech sounds interesting as hell for making fake theme parks about extinct animals, though, and supplementing existing zoos with demos of being up close to an animal. Kids going to the zoo to see a grizzly bear would be a hell of a lot more impressed by seeing a live one and then getting to get close to a fake one to see just how huge they can be.
I could even see there being a point to having a few "exhibitless" zoos where the "animals" are just walking around for people to interact with, but no way do I see this as an effective wholesale replacement of zoos everywhere. Seeing a fake polar bear simply isn't the same experience as seeing an actual living, thinking one on the other side of some glass.
I never thought it would be controversial to say that the entire point of a zoo was to see a real animal.
There's a lot of really horrible abusive zoos in China, which is where the dolphins were going to be installed IRRC.
I think there's a lot of value in urban kids being able to have some level of contact with real animals, but I would be completely happy if those environments were more regulated and restricted and instead we replaced a lot of the small shitty private zoos that currently exist with advanced animatronics. Advances in biomimicry are pretty awesome in their own right, as long as we recognize that robots are a separate thing and in no way make up for the loss of population and habitat of the animals themselves.
hahaha
no but I know those guys (usually they make a big deal about its jumping prowess rather than its doorknob prowess, which is frankly a bit shit). It's extremely cute!
hahaha
no but I know those guys (usually they make a big deal about its jumping prowess rather than its doorknob prowess, which is frankly a bit shit). It's extremely cute!
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Would you also contend that the Natural History Museum is a poor substitute for a Zoo?
Although I guess there could be something to be said for the educational and olfactory experience of being downwind of an animal spontaneously evacuating it’s bowels.
MWO: Adamski
I would contend that they are fundamentally different things. A robot dolphin could make sense in the former context, and is antithetical to the latter.
Maybe I should have made this more clear in my first post on this. My view is that appeal of a zoo is the opportunity to interact with, or at least observe, actual non-human, living creatures, behaving according to their biological programming. A human controlled simulacrum isn't even an AI acting like a dolphin. It's a a costume. It's Disney. It's a fundamentally un-like thing.
If an animal is too intelligent* to be kept in captivity, then go see it in the wild. Go whale watching some time. There are a fucking shitload of dolphins. If it's too rare or too sensitive to be reasonably encountered in the wild, then watch some Attenborough.
If it's a dinosaur, then do whatever, I don't care.
*obviously this definition is critical to the discussion, but outside the context of the argument we're having here.
*assuming said animal interactions are ethical
So for humane animal interaction you have pretty much the entirety of farmyard livestock, with some interesting imported livestock.
Less humane would be the apex predators and other top of the food chain creatures both land based and sea based.
MWO: Adamski
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the barnacle probably doesn't give a fuck if it's in the open ocean or a tank.
or go swimming with a realistic Great White robot.
Which is still something I'd like to do at some point. Though in a shark cage out in the open ocean with a real one.
Such range and control is still sci-fi stuff, but you could do things like make one that blends in with the sharks that live in the middle of the deep water pacific, some of the most barren and desolate environments on the planet (which is why they're kind of hard to study).
Although the failings of the Bruce model become more and more obvious as we keep making screens bigger and resolution more detailed.
If it's true, China is hushing it up quite well. And unfortunately it's something very easy to hush up until it very suddenly can't be anymore.
The hydrologist who is being named, Wang Weiluo, has either claimed the dam is about to fail after every significant rainfall or western media keeps dredging up the time he did after every heavy rain. Water is past the warning stage, but it's been higher a number of times. It hasn't yet reached the spillways and they haven't opened the drains fully yet, and the government people who run it have shown they have no real problem opening everything up without warning or consideration of the downriver human costs.
Even if it were deficient it's not a very old dam. Dam failures tend to be all at once very early or slowly with all too much warning along the way.
I saw my first (and only) orca show as a teen. The main education I took from the experience was how obviously wrong it was. As awe-inspiring as it was to see the whale up close and see how big it was, and how incredibly powerful, it wasn't worth it. I came away feeling soul-sick. I felt like I'd committed violence.
There are still ethical ways to interact with live dolphins, both in the wild and in captivity. The Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys, for example, keeps only animals that either were born there,* or have been rescued (from other facilities or from injuries sustained in the wild) and cannot be released. They do shows and interactive experiences to raise money, but their first priority is the wellbeing of their residents, and it shows. They also actually do a lot of research on dolphin intelligence and society. (Last time I was there, in 2014, they were looking into object permanence. Turns out that although dolphins will, for example, hide things and remember where they hid them, they don't seem to understand containers - e.g., they're terrible at the shell game. The write up speculated that maybe it's because containers aren't really a thing in the ocean :razz: )
*Personally I'm not comfortable with allowing dolphins to breed in captivity either, but I'll concede it's a gray area.
Most dolphin/whale shows aren't educational; they're just spectacle. An opportunity to see (and maybe touch) an exotic creature up close. Sea World is famously awful for its resident cetaceans; and many places that have captive dolphins on display aren't Sea World - they're much worse.
I don't think dolphin shows are going to go away - they just make too much money. If animatronics can become an attractive (read: cheaper) alternative for unethical operators, so much the better.
For zoos and so forth, if large animal exhibits were replaced with realistic animatronics with very clear explanations that the animals aren't real (because that would be cruel), but they're bleeding-edge realistic, I think people would adjust. The difference between seeing footage of, for example, elephants and seeing elephants in the flesh is mostly a sense of size, presence, and sheer mass. Animatronics could give you that. The only thing a real animal has that a robot doesn't is a mind; and if you can't keep the mind without harming it, it's not representative of the wild animal anyway. Zoos would still be able to offer experiences you can't get anywhere else (even in VR), without the cost, difficulty, and ethical concerns of keeping animals that really shouldn't be kept.
There are other applications, too. Animal performers in films could be replaced with animatronics, for example. No matter how good CG gets, practical effects still hold up better over time.
From a darker perspective, if we learn how to make hyper-realistic robot animals now, we'll still have them - for educational purposes - when the animals themselves are gone.
...as an aside, I would love to see the internals of that dolphinbot!
edit: the video doesn't mention it, but this is incredibly cool! https://www.goodnet.org/articles/celebrating-new-dolphin-prototype-that-may-just-change-history
I mean, the blowhole, obviously. It's an educational dolphin built to mimic, it's gotta refill just like a real dolphin. Now, are you going to answer questions with questions, or are you gonna give up the deets on the robodolphin dick?
Folks have been claiming that a Three Gorges failure is imminent pretty much since it was built. I remember it being a big topic in high school debate the year the topic was Chinese relations.
The bolded part is where it falls apart.
No one viewing animals in a zoo is watching them behaving according to their biological programming.
They are at best watching them interact with in environment that is alien and thus counteractive to them behaving according to their biological programming.
Zoos are and always have been and always will be bullshit when it comes to observing animals behaving as they would in nature.
I'm certainly not going to assert that interacting with robo-animals is better for seeing that but since it could theoretically allow for fewer animals being placed in shitty facsimiles of their natural habitat?
Yeah I'm on board.
And the kinds of zoos that are truly horrible for animals are the kinds of zoos which would also never pay for an expensive robot animal and an operator to pretend to be an animal, so that's not going to fix anything.
The tech sounds interesting as hell for making fake theme parks about extinct animals, though, and supplementing existing zoos with demos of being up close to an animal. Kids going to the zoo to see a grizzly bear would be a hell of a lot more impressed by seeing a live one and then getting to get close to a fake one to see just how huge they can be.
I could even see there being a point to having a few "exhibitless" zoos where the "animals" are just walking around for people to interact with, but no way do I see this as an effective wholesale replacement of zoos everywhere. Seeing a fake polar bear simply isn't the same experience as seeing an actual living, thinking one on the other side of some glass.
PSN:Furlion
Marine mammals can't. Its straight up fucking cruel, like trapping a human in solitary for the rest of their lives. These animals are just too smart and designed to range too far to take it in most cases. They often go crazy, die, or kill. So I'm all for orca robots.
All the animals in Robot Park are female. We know robots can't breed but we've seen enough movies and we aren't taking chances.
"You don't let them breed, but you let them repair. What if they 'repair' something new?"
*dramatic sting as all the clues fall into place*
I don't think we're talking robot on robot copulation.
Not if we want to make the real money anyway...
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.
Edit: oh, this makes a lot more sense
I mean it's still fucking stupid that we have to do a lot of science to convince doctors that not all our physical problems are just "crazy-women-brain, try being less crazy and/or woman"
but the study itself is more nuanced and important.
Medicine has a fuckton of misogyny.
Everything has a fuckton of misogyny
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/invisible-women/
YMMV, but Nature on PBS did more to get me interested in wildlife as a kid than zoos ever did. Not that zoos aren't cool, but Nature was so much more interesting :razz:
I was a kid for whom most things that claimed to "get kids interested in _______!" fell utterly flat, though. I don't know how typical that is.
I never thought it would be controversial to say that the entire point of a zoo was to see a real animal.
I think there's a lot of value in urban kids being able to have some level of contact with real animals, but I would be completely happy if those environments were more regulated and restricted and instead we replaced a lot of the small shitty private zoos that currently exist with advanced animatronics. Advances in biomimicry are pretty awesome in their own right, as long as we recognize that robots are a separate thing and in no way make up for the loss of population and habitat of the animals themselves.
no but I know those guys (usually they make a big deal about its jumping prowess rather than its doorknob prowess, which is frankly a bit shit). It's extremely cute!
That's what it wants you to think.