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At Princeton University, students are going viral for teaching a Spot robot from Boston Dynamics some new dance moves. Its line-dancing and ballet routines have garnered over 7 million views across half a dozen TikTok videos, but these clips aren’t just for social media fame. In an interview with PCMag, three Princeton undergraduates share their big-picture reasons for creating the TikTok account and why they chose to make Spot dance.The students accessed the pricey robot by enrolling in an interdisciplinary course called “Robots in Human Ecology: A Hands-on Course for Anthropologists, Engineers, and Policymakers.” The class asks students to develop a “civilian use case” for Spot and consider the robot’s social and ethical implications, Ryo Morimoto, assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton, tells PCMag via email. Morimoto teaches the class alongside aerospace engineering associate professor Alex Glaser, and they chose Spot because of Boston Dynamics’ connection to nuclear robotics and the company’s unique history.”Boston Dynamics has a complicated history with the military,” Morimoto says. “Although the company was heavily funded by the military initially, it currently tries to move away from it with its anti-weaponization policy.”As of last year, about 1,000 Spot robots are in use globally, mostly for industrial purposes (like Ford’s). Boston Dynamics doesn’t currently list the cost of a Spot robot on its website, but in 2020, one would set you back nearly $75,000. Princeton paid for its robot but got the choreography package worth about $10,000 for free.
Gigi Schadrack, a dancer who studies public policy at Princeton, tells PCMag she worked with her friend and classmate Liora Nasi, who programmed Spot with a separate piece of hardware to align with Schadrack’s moves. The dances were not improvised; they required hours of coordination and practice before anything was recorded.“It was a lot of back-and-forth, setting things, and making them look just right,” Nasi tells PCMag.
Schadrack admits Spot was a little offputting at first. “I think I was the most scared of it out of everyone in the class,” she says. Those sentiments also showed up in the comments of the students’ TikTok videos. “Some people called Spot a weapon of mass destruction. I study weapons of mass destruction—it’s not.”One commenter said Boston Dynamics should hire Schadrack to “do the marketing” for Spot, while another asked: “Is this what I’ll see before it shoots me?” Others were less concerned and projected a dog’s personality onto Spot, calling it cute and “weirdly adorable.” A few joked about robot overlords. Boston Dynamics’ lead product designer, Leland Hepler, has said Spot was designed to reduce human fear and increase comfort with the robot through a variety of visual cues, such as its bright yellow color, directional light signals to help anticipate Spot’s movements, and, of course, its dog-like quadruped form.
It’s still a work in progress. The students found that while Spot is an incredible technological advancement, it can also be clumsy at times.”The robot has incredible kinesthetic skills, being able to balance itself, and yet it can’t do some simple things that we can take for granted,” says Wasif Sami. A Princeton student who’s interested in anthropology and theater, Sami enrolled in the course in part to study human response and reactions to such a high-tech robot.
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“The media has the masses thinking that robots are super-duper advanced and autonomous,” Schadrack says. “But that’s not quite true.”The students hope their TikTok account—which isn’t officially affiliated with Boston Dynamics or Princeton—will educate, entertain, and promote the peaceful use of robots as well as the Stop Killer Robots campaign. “As I got to spend more time messing [around] with the robot and figuring out what its capabilities are, I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, these robots aren’t going to replace us,'” Schadrack says.For now, Spot gets to show off some pretty cool line-dancing skills instead. “Popular culture and the media greatly impact the general public’s robotic imagination,” Morimoto says. “The lesson for us is that humans are always in the loop when considering robots and their (programmed) actions. It also shows the importance of exploring robotics from technoscientific approaches and social science and humanities perspectives.”
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