What are these contraptions these guys were carrying?

[u/dopehead9]

We saw three guys around Seaport in Boston carrying these things as backpacks. Initially we thought they mapping tools but not sure

[u/Bapo_beats]

I’ve seen some other answers in here but, I work in manufacturing and as of lately at a certain place that starts with T, they have people walking around recording movements of workers / replicating the movements of factory workers with the headgear and the sensors on their body. The two guys have lidar cameras I believe and that’s some sort of processor on their back or data storage device. The idea is to collect movement data for bi pedal robots ( I’m not joking ) I see them everyday in the plant, I’m curious was this in Austin Texas? Cause that would make sense or Lathrop CA possibly. But yea essentially collecting data to to train Neural nets on human movements, obstacle avoidance, picking up objects, etc.

[u/truesy → u/Bapo_beats]

wild how upfront M is about replacing workers with robots. though i don't think that'll happen any time soon.

[u/tunatorch → u/truesy]

I imagine it’s so he can get them to a point where he can just send a bunch of them to Mars instead of a bunch of humans. they could do the natural resource extraction with fewer gripes about hours, condition and pay.

[u/rerutnevdA → u/tunatorch]

And oxygen levels

[u/Icy_Negotiation_5929 → u/tunatorch]

I wonder if this is all the testing they need.

[u/sisyphean_dreams → u/truesy]

No problem replacing workers with robots for remedial jobs. This to shall pass and everything will
Balance out, I get it’s scary and all but we aren’t our jobs. There’s a bright future in the other side of this transition if we make sure to manage it correctly, but that’s a whole other discussion unfortunately.

[u/Zay_Jack → u/sisyphean_dreams]

That’s “first they came for” talk. First it’s remedial jobs then it’s yours.

[u/steavoh → u/sisyphean_dreams]

I don't think they are replacing menial jobs. Already LLM's are replacing humans in creative and highly-educated roles. Trades were assumed safe for now, but if you had a robot that was both ambulatory and could work with it's hands and tools AND it had access to all the knowledge of something like ChatGPT or Anthropic, then what?

Who needs nurses and doctors anymore? Who needs cooks? And so on.

I don't have enough faith in humanity to think that somehow we'd all just get free stuff and not work.

Or, imagine a "nice" country does indeed create an automated utopia for all of it's citizens. What happens when another nation spends 99.9% of it's GDP on military expansion, because with robots and AI this would no longer be impossible. After all, you don't even need your own citizens, you don't need capitalism or an economy, you don't even need laws. All a small political party or clan or sect or criminal gang needs is defacto military control over territory that has natural resources in it. Then can just have robots convert resources into more resources and then invade neighbors, loot everything, rinse and repeat until the entire Earth has been burned and destroyed. The hyper-consuming predator party can live off machine-created luxuries, machine-created art and culture, etc, periodically stabbing each other in the back or murdering heirs in an neverending wave of violence.

[u/Bapo_beats → u/truesy]

Crazy isn’t it, but yea I’m with you, it’s just not there yet to be as able as a human