Columbia
Technology has made some amazing strides over the past few decades as mankind finally begins to hurtle toward the future television shows in the 1960s assumed we’d be living in by now.
We could soon exist in a world where you can save your relationship by paying a robot to build IKEA furniture and self-driving cars will bring pizza to your door— as long as the technology we birth doesn’t kill us first.
For years, the people at Boston Dynamics (who are basically the closest thing the world has to the scientists from Jurassic Park) have been at the forefront of the robotic field thanks to their ability to create machines that should strike terror into anyone who’s seen them in action.
Of course, why would you stop at robots that can run when you can design one capable of doing backflips?
And how can we forget the one that’s literally out of an episode of Black Mirror?
At least it can’t fight b— oh. Wait. It can totally fight back.
Welp. We’re screwed.
Thankfully, there are some people out there using robotics for good instead of potential evil. This apparently includes the United States government, which reportedly dropped millions of dollars in pursuit of an incredibly noble cause: bartending robots.
According to Business Insider, a new spending bill is being introduced to Congress that would prohibit federal funds from being used to develop “beerbots” or “other robot bartenders” after it was revealed the Defense Department gave researchers at MIT $2 million to invent a machine that can serve you drinks.
Here’s what it looks like in action.
In official terms, the goal of the project was “to control a group of robots interacting with an environment in order to cooperatively solve a problem”— with the problem in this case being “having to stand up to get a beer.”
Say what you will, but as far as I’m concerned, making a robot that can bring you a beer a reality is a great use of my tax dollars.