正文 · AI 翻译
IT Home reported on October 28, citing The New York Times, that earlier this month a San Francisco startup posted an unusual job listing: hiring people to walk robot dogs, with no relevant experience required.
The hourly pay for walking a robot dog is roughly the same as for walking a real dog, but the robot dog needs to roam city sidewalks longer to complete its data collection tasks. The job ad specified four to six hours of continuous walking each time.
The good news is that you do not have to clean up after it. The bad news is that robot dogs can be temperamental, just like real dogs. Just as an ordinary dog might suddenly lie down in the middle of a busy road and refuse to move, a robot dog might stop working partway through a walk because it has overheated. The walker would then have to carry the four-legged machine back to the startup's office. The ad specifically warned applicants that they must be able to safely carry a device weighing about 33 pounds (about 15 kilograms).
The job post, which has since been deleted, offered $20 an hour (IT Home note: about 133.6 yuan at the current exchange rate). A startup called Dimensional posted it in the Facebook group “Bay Area Jobs.” Coincidentally, the company is located in a San Francisco neighborhood called Dogpatch. There were only a few comments under the post, and no one seemed to find it strange. One mother wrote, “My son is interested and can start immediately.”
Dimensional founder Stash Pomichter said the company is developing an open-source operating system for robots. Pomichter, 26, hopes to embed AI agents in robots so users can direct them to do work in the physical world.
Pomichter firmly believes people should be able to direct robots to move heavy boxes and deliver items. “The fact that humans are still doing this kind of physical labor is, frankly, so primitive,” he said in an interview.
Before robot dogs can carry our groceries and do heavy work for us, however, Dimensional first needs to improve their ability to navigate city environments autonomously. That is why it is hiring robot dog walkers: workers control and guide the dogs while their onboard cameras and sensors record the journey, generating what Pomichter calls “real-world benchmark data.”
A local resident filmed someone walking the four-legged robot dog and sent the video to The New York Times, remarking that San Francisco was already strange and was now becoming even more absurd.
Dimensional is not a hardware manufacturer. Pomichter said the company has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots from manufacturers in the United States, China and Germany. It is developing its own operating system that can connect with AI agents to give the machines greater autonomy. The $2,000 robot dog (about 13,362 yuan at the current exchange rate) given to walkers this month came from China's Unitree Robotics and can be controlled out of the box with a remote control or smartphone app.
Dimensional compared the robot dog's performance in 2 modes: under human control and under the autonomous control of an AI agent. It found that the AI agent's control capabilities were still far behind.
“Our conclusion from this dog-walking experiment is that AI agents are still very bad at controlling hardware,” Pomichter said. “At this stage, humans still need to be involved.”
Their goal is to put robots to work in factories, data centers and construction sites, or have them conduct security patrols. Similar uses are already in place: a robot dog patrols an apartment complex in Atlanta, with staff in the Philippines monitoring it remotely. The machine is essentially a mobile security camera that lets remote personnel view its footage.
Pomichter said he programmed a robot dog to patrol the company's warehouse-like office at night. He gave it the prompt “You are the best security dog in the world” and instructed it to follow anyone entering the building after midnight. If it detects someone, the robot dog sends him a text message. He then checks the surveillance footage to determine whether the person is an employee working late or an intruder.
Not everyone finds the robot dogs roaming Dogpatch amusing. Dimensional wants to give AI agents physical bodies, while a growing number of people worry that more powerful AI could pose a threat to humanity.
That Terminator-like association made one man deeply wary. He went to the company's office and then sent Dimensional employees a threatening text message claiming that the robot dogs would be turned into weapons. The New York Times saw the message: “Just wait to help slaughter ordinary people indiscriminately, scum.” Dimensional has reported the matter to the police.
“We may encounter more situations like this in the future,” Pomichter said. “If so, we might need more robot dogs on patrol.”