Does Your Dog Byte?

In a classic scene from the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Inspector Clouseau asks a hotel clerk, “Does your dog bite?” The clerk says no. When Clouseau reaches down to pet the dog, he is viciously bitten. So he says, “I thought you said your dog did not bite?” The hotel clerk explains, “That is not my dog.” One assumes that misunderstandings like this will be avoided on the streets of San Francisco where an industrious few are being offered twenty bucks an hour to walk robot-dogs. It somehow makes sense that we’re training robotic dogs. With all the sycophancy from Claude and ChatGPT, AI has already taken over the title of Man’s Best Friend. “On the positive side, there was no need to clean up after the robot, or to pretend you did not see the deposit it left behind on someone’s yard. On the negative side, the robots could prove as stubborn as their living counterparts. Just as a normal dog might suddenly plop down and refuse to budge in the middle of a busy street, the robot dogs, too, might give up mid-walk — because their equipment overheated. Robot dog walkers would then need to carry the mechanical quadrupeds back to the start-up’s office.” Kashmir Hill in the NYT (Gift Article): Wanted: Robot-Dog Walkers. “Dimensional is building an open-source operating system for robots, said its founder, Stash Pomichter. Mr. Pomichter, who is 26, wants to embed A.I. agents in robots so that consumers can command them to do work in the real world.” Work? That’s definitely not my dog.

+ Ars Technica: ICE plan to buy robot dogs spurs protest. “Hundreds of employees at the US robotics firm Boston Dynamics signed a petition calling for executives to halt a sale of the company’s robot dogs to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement—but executives stood by the deal, while saying the robots would not be weaponized.” Even Inspector Clouseau wouldn’t buy that…