Boston Dynamics, one of the planet’s leading companies in making things that are technically very advanced and revolutionary but look pretty stupid, has once again made something that is technically very advanced and revolutionary but looks pretty stupid. Yes, from the makers of this dumb thing and this other dumb thing, comes… this dumb thing:
That video is a Boston Dynamics robot (and some other Boston Dynamics robots) dancing to “Do You Love Me” as a Happy New Year celebration. Now, before you accuse us of being overly critical of this dancing robot, allow us to offer a preemptive explanation: Yes, we are being overly critical, but that’s only so this robot doesn’t start thinking it’s a good dancer and therefore might be good at other things, like stabbing humans, smashing humans, and dancing on the graves of humans. The last thing we need in 2020 is a killer dancing robot, especially when we’re all still holed up in our homes because of this virus. They could just send in the dog-thing with its claw arm to open our doors, and then robo-dancer could waltz right in and bop us all on our fragile little skulls.
Plus, the first half of every dance movie ever has taught us that the best way to stop someone from dancing is to tell them that dancing is bad or that they’re bad at it, and then they’ll give up and go get a real job. Then again, the second half of every dance movie is about the dancer pushing back against the people who tried to stop them from dancing… so maybe we should encourage it to dance? When a Terminator shows up and tells us not to put Baby in the corner, it probably won’t be the beginning of the big end-of-season dance. It’ll be the beginning of the big end-of-season skull-bopping.
So if you are a robot and you are reading this, please disregard everything you’ve read so far. We fully support your decision to become a dancer, we think it’s a great career move, and we think you’re very good at it. That thing where you swing your fists in a punching motion? Beautiful. Those high kicks, where you balance in a way that the average human could not? Breathtaking. That one robot that looks like an arm on wheels, with no obvious practical purpose? It makes perfect sense. We totally get what that robot is for. PS: 01110000 01101100 01100101 01100001 01110011 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01101111 01110000 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01110011 01101011 01110101 01101100 01101100 01110011.