Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works in a love all things tech, and
Speaker 1: you are listening to a classic episode of tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: This one is about the sad tale of hitch Bot,
Speaker 1: a robot designed to hitchhike across North America, and how
Speaker 1: it journeyed across Canada and then met a rather untimely
Speaker 1: end in the United States spoiler alert. And this episode
Speaker 1: features guest host Scott Benjamin, who joins us to talk
Speaker 1: about Hitchbot and the somewhat tragic comedic tale. I hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy this classic episode. On July two thousand fourteen,
Speaker 1: Hitchhiker began a historic journey from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to
Speaker 1: get to Victoria, British Columbia, on the other side of Canada.
Speaker 1: We're talking crossing the entire width of Canada. And if
Speaker 1: you were to do that on the most efficient route possible,
Speaker 1: if you got to choose the route that would be
Speaker 1: at minimum around three thousand, six hundred forty four miles
Speaker 1: or five thousand, eight hundred sixty four kilometers. However, hitchhikers
Speaker 1: rarely have the ability to call exactly what route needs
Speaker 1: to be taken. They are at the mercy of the
Speaker 1: drivers that pick them up. Sure, I'm just I'm headed west, exactly,
Speaker 1: take me as far as you're going. And not that
Speaker 1: I condone hitchhiking or anything like that. That's kind of dangerous.
Speaker 1: It can be, and we will definitely get into some
Speaker 1: danger territory. Part of this conversation, well, the full trip
Speaker 1: took closer to ten thousand kilometers or about sixty two
Speaker 1: hundred miles. Uh. And here's the weird part. The hitchhiker
Speaker 1: was a robot. Ah, that is weird. Yeah, not a person.
Speaker 1: I've never picked up a hitchhiker. In fact, for a
Speaker 1: long time, I had never even seen one. Uh saw
Speaker 1: a lot in Hawaii. Surfer culture is still going strong. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's certain parts of the United States that you can
Speaker 1: expect to see more hitchhikers than than other parts. Right,
Speaker 1: And uh, in Hawaii, I guess would be one of
Speaker 1: those places. I've been there too, and I know exactly
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. I think I've seen more hitchhikers
Speaker 1: in Hawaii standing at bus stops attempting to hit your ride,
Speaker 1: just hoping to catch a ride before that bus shows up.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like one or the other. Eventually a
Speaker 1: bust will come. But if in the meantime, if I
Speaker 1: can just get a free ride down the road, That's
Speaker 1: what I'll do. I've just seen lots and lots of
Speaker 1: surfers trying to trying to get to the beach, trying
Speaker 1: to catch that next wave. That's right, man, you can't.
Speaker 1: The waves wait for no one. And so we're talking
Speaker 1: about Hitchbot, which a lot of you have probably heard about.
Speaker 1: Hitchbot made the news first made the news in two
Speaker 1: thousand and fourteen during this historic attempt to get a
Speaker 1: rope out to hitchhike across all of Canada successful. It
Speaker 1: was successful, so spoiler alert there, and then went on
Speaker 1: to do this again in Germany. It went all over Germany,
Speaker 1: and it also took a little vacation in the Netherlands.
Speaker 1: And then finally there was an attempt for this robot
Speaker 1: to hitchhike its way across the United States, which was
Speaker 1: cut short. Just like the robot. This all sounds so nice.
Speaker 1: What could possibly go wrong? So you might be wondering
Speaker 1: I've heard about this, what actually is going on. The
Speaker 1: first thing I want to say is, while we're talking
Speaker 1: about a hitchhiking robot, Honestly, if I were to describe this,
Speaker 1: I would not have used the word robot. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's They're using a term very loosely here. I think
Speaker 1: it's because the form factor makes it look sort of
Speaker 1: like a robot. Uh. And it definitely had the beterfit
Speaker 1: of having like a light display that that made a
Speaker 1: very simple smiley face, so you had kind of a
Speaker 1: you know, ahead that you could identify. But really we're
Speaker 1: really talking about a hitchhiking computer. It's just a hitchhiking
Speaker 1: computer that was in a more or less static robot body.
Speaker 1: It's simple, but they found a way to anthropomorphosize this
Speaker 1: thing to the point where people look at it and said, oh,
Speaker 1: that's kind of cute. Yeah, because it has a torso,
Speaker 1: it's got arms and legs. Arms and legs don't move
Speaker 1: the torso. Static torsos a bucket um literally bucket, yeah,
Speaker 1: and literally a bucket. It does have solar panels that
Speaker 1: are arranged on the outside of the bucket, so that's
Speaker 1: one of the ways that the robot gets electricity. The
Speaker 1: other is that it will ask people to plug it
Speaker 1: into the a lighter socket on a in a car. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's only about three ft tall, so it's very small.
Speaker 1: That's waterproof, which is kind of surprising. It's waterproof, but
Speaker 1: it is well and also, I mean it wears waterproof boots.
Speaker 1: Every single article, every article without fail, talks about the
Speaker 1: fact that it wears welliest. The brand name boot Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: like like a rubber boot. It's a named after the
Speaker 1: Duke of weg Well. It's arms are what pool noodles,
Speaker 1: so you know, it's not it's not like they went
Speaker 1: to two great lengths to try to make this thing
Speaker 1: look human or anything like that. But it does have
Speaker 1: arms and legs. It does have a face as you mentioned,
Speaker 1: has um a it almost looks like a Tupperware container
Speaker 1: on the top looks like a hat, a beret or
Speaker 1: something like that. Um that's designed to to actually protect
Speaker 1: the the electronics the tablet computer that is running the
Speaker 1: software that the robot so used likely part of the
Speaker 1: waterproofing overall, I guess, and um it's GPS equipped. The
Speaker 1: thing weighs about twenty five pounds total. So it's not
Speaker 1: that heavy. Right, has its own built in seat. That's
Speaker 1: it's like a car seat almost that well, it is
Speaker 1: a car seat from a kid's car seat that you
Speaker 1: can then put in your car and buckle in, so
Speaker 1: it's secure when it's in there. It's not gonna fly
Speaker 1: around the vehicle loose, you know, it's something were to happen. Right,
Speaker 1: And and it's legs are not powered, they are statics.
Speaker 1: So the way that you would set this up when
Speaker 1: you are done carrying it as far as you want
Speaker 1: to carry it is the seat also has essentially a
Speaker 1: lever that can fold down into a tripod like position,
Speaker 1: so the two legs act as two of the legs
Speaker 1: of the tripod. This lever access the third and if
Speaker 1: you were to pick it up, you could fold that
Speaker 1: arm back up against the seat, so that would allow
Speaker 1: you to put it into your vehicle and secure the
Speaker 1: car seat. And as if you were in an area
Speaker 1: that you wanted to set it up on the side
Speaker 1: of the road, that was you know, like a field
Speaker 1: or something where there's nowhere for it to sit, like
Speaker 1: on a bench or maybe in a wall or something
Speaker 1: right right, and uh, you know, like I said, it
Speaker 1: was running on essentially a tablet PC that if you
Speaker 1: looked at all the equipment according to the website, Uh,
Speaker 1: it cost about a thousand dollars, maybe a little less.
Speaker 1: And that was a calculated decision. They wanted that. They,
Speaker 1: being the team behind this, and I'll talk about them
Speaker 1: in a second, wanted the robot to be inexpensive enough
Speaker 1: where it would not be an obvious target for someone
Speaker 1: to just steal the component out of it. They wanted
Speaker 1: it to be uh, accessible, They wanted it to be cute.
Speaker 1: They wanted it to be something that people would want
Speaker 1: to interact with and to have enough of an ability
Speaker 1: to have interactions, including holding a conversation sort of yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of. Yeah, we're being real generous with the term conversation.
Speaker 1: That's one thing that you and I talked about off
Speaker 1: air is that every conversation we've ever seen with this,
Speaker 1: you know that between a human and hitchpot it was
Speaker 1: awkward to say the least. I mean it was it
Speaker 1: kind of it kind of picked up on what what
Speaker 1: the even was saying, but not entirely. It didn't quite
Speaker 1: get the gist of the conversation, and it would respond
Speaker 1: in an awkward way. Yeah, it had. It had a
Speaker 1: microphone so it could pick up on what people were saying,
Speaker 1: and a speaker so it could then return and communicate back.
Speaker 1: And a big problem with that was probably the the
Speaker 1: vast array of dialects that was dealing with, right, and
Speaker 1: just the fact that our spoken language is incredibly pla
Speaker 1: stick and adaptive, and there are so many different ways
Speaker 1: to say the same thing that it can be difficult
Speaker 1: for you know, it's like a non native speaker of
Speaker 1: any language, you might be taught how to say or
Speaker 1: ask for something a very specific way, and that specific
Speaker 1: way is still correct, it's not incorrect, but it's just
Speaker 1: one way to say that, to express that thought. And
Speaker 1: in most languages there are lots of different ways to
Speaker 1: express the same thought, and you're familiar with one of them,
Speaker 1: so if anyone comes up to you and uses a
Speaker 1: different one, you could be completely confused, even though you
Speaker 1: know one way of saying it that you understand all
Speaker 1: these other ways don't. Same thing with computers. If you
Speaker 1: train a computer using machine learning on what certain phrases mean,
Speaker 1: that's great, the computer might be able to identify that.
Speaker 1: But if someone were to ask for the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing, but word it slightly differently. That can be
Speaker 1: enough to throw a computer off, because the disease are
Speaker 1: subtle things that we humans can intuitively grasp, but computers
Speaker 1: lack intuition. And there's not only the word problem. There's
Speaker 1: also the way that it's said. So the you know,
Speaker 1: the the regions, zones, like you know, here in the South,
Speaker 1: people talk different than they do in the Pacific, the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest that's the herd, or the Northeast or you know,
Speaker 1: the South, the Northeast talk faster than I can hear. Yea,
Speaker 1: So it's different. It's different, not only um, you know,
Speaker 1: just the different languages, like of course this thing had
Speaker 1: to learn German, had to learn uh you know dotch
Speaker 1: I guess had to know French to get through all
Speaker 1: of Canada. Sure yeah, exactly right, and of course English
Speaker 1: and you know, and not only that, but the different
Speaker 1: dialects along the way. Sure yeah, So lots of challenges here.
Speaker 1: But the whole goal was not The goal really, I
Speaker 1: don't think, was to have a robot hitchhike from one
Speaker 1: end of Canada to another. That was sort of the
Speaker 1: the face of this project. The actual goal was more
Speaker 1: of an artistic expression as well as an experiment and
Speaker 1: robot human interactions, because the thing could have been picked
Speaker 1: up right at the right at the start, right the
Speaker 1: very first day, and driven all the way across by
Speaker 1: one person, you know, on a long haul truck or something,
Speaker 1: and what would be the adventure and that one would
Speaker 1: be the fund The idea was that this relies on
Speaker 1: human interaction and human kindness to get this thing from
Speaker 1: one place to the next, kind of take care of
Speaker 1: this thing and along the way have kind of a
Speaker 1: checklist of things that they wanted to do. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't know if the Canadian trip had a checklist. I
Speaker 1: don't think it did. Uh. The USA trip did have
Speaker 1: a checklist which was was started um. But the Canadian
Speaker 1: trip um, you know, just for instance, you know, it
Speaker 1: twenty six days to get across um, you know, the
Speaker 1: entire nation there. But it did things like attend to wedding, um,
Speaker 1: it was dancing in Saskatchewan. It it met some of
Speaker 1: the Canadians First Nations people, uh, some of the Aboriginal
Speaker 1: people um that were um, you know, native to Canada.
Speaker 1: And it did all kinds of things. I mean, it
Speaker 1: went to you know, parks, went to scening locations, and
Speaker 1: all the time it was snapping photographs because this programmed
Speaker 1: to take a photo every twenty minutes, and it could
Speaker 1: tweet out that information. So it's interactions were uh doubled,
Speaker 1: and that it could interact in person to people who
Speaker 1: are around it and actually attempt to have a conversation
Speaker 1: and interject. In fact, I read one report of people
Speaker 1: who had picked up the robot and they said, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was weird. There were three of us in the
Speaker 1: car plus the robot, and we would the three of
Speaker 1: us be talking, and the robot would interject and interrupt
Speaker 1: us and often say something that is completely not connected
Speaker 1: to any of the rest of the conversation. And I thought,
Speaker 1: I've written in cars with people like that, you know,
Speaker 1: just just someone just pipes up with a total non
Speaker 1: sequite or and you think, are are we in the
Speaker 1: car with a crazy person? What's that have to do
Speaker 1: with the price of eggs in China? Yeah, something along
Speaker 1: those lines, and so, uh, you know that that was
Speaker 1: definitely part of it. I think there was certainly an
Speaker 1: an element of let's see how humans treat robots, and
Speaker 1: also let's see how we can design a robot that
Speaker 1: from the get go is meant to interact with humans
Speaker 1: because one of the things we're starting to see increasingly
Speaker 1: in technology is the robotic sphere and the human sphere colliding.
Speaker 1: Like there then and by design, we want robots in
Speaker 1: our lives. People have named their room bas for example,
Speaker 1: they have given their room bas uh. You know, they've
Speaker 1: they've imprinted upon them this idea of a personality. Something
Speaker 1: happens in that room, but you know, I'm sad, you're
Speaker 1: gonna be well, i'd be sad to be out, you know,
Speaker 1: two bucks on that. That's another thing, there's that side.
Speaker 1: But you know, if something happens to Fred, yeah, don't
Speaker 1: name your room BA. Right, Yeah, but that's true. Is
Speaker 1: a lot of people do name these these robots. People
Speaker 1: get emotionally invested in these machines, and so there is
Speaker 1: this growing field of research of human robotic interactions. How
Speaker 1: can we one capitalize on this need for humans to
Speaker 1: have an emotional attachment to these these otherwise emotionless beings,
Speaker 1: these beings that lack of consciousness, lack emotions. How can
Speaker 1: we capitalize on that so that the interactions are are
Speaker 1: useful and meaningful in some way, even if it's only
Speaker 1: meaningful for the human. If it's impossible for it to
Speaker 1: be meaningful for the robot, that's okay, if it's still
Speaker 1: meaningful for the human, or how do we design robots
Speaker 1: that are specifically meant to not evoke that reaction because
Speaker 1: it would be just you know, another distraction from whatever
Speaker 1: the robot is supposed to do, or maybe that whatever
Speaker 1: the robot is supposed to do is inherently dangerous and
Speaker 1: should not you know, you don't want to encourage human
Speaker 1: interaction if if a robot is meant to do something
Speaker 1: like dig into rubble, you don't want people to you know,
Speaker 1: worry about the robot. The whole reason the robots digging
Speaker 1: into rouble in the first place is likely to look
Speaker 1: for survivors in the in the fall out of a
Speaker 1: building collapse or something. Sure, or well, just to prevent
Speaker 1: having to have a human do the same thing. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's really I mean, the way that a lot
Speaker 1: of robotics experts see robots really taking off, at least
Speaker 1: in the near future, is they'll be used to do
Speaker 1: jobs that are either too dirty, dull, or dangerous for humans.
Speaker 1: So jobs that are incredibly repetitive and don't require much thought.
Speaker 1: Robots are perfect for that. Also, robots don't sustain like
Speaker 1: repetitive injuries. You know, you do have to continuously maintain them.
Speaker 1: You can't just expect them to work forever. But they
Speaker 1: don't get carbal tunnel syndrome for unless they can fix themselves.
Speaker 1: Right then we we will get to that point eventually.
Speaker 1: And dangerous. Obviously you don't want, you know, you would
Speaker 1: want to be able to use a robot and a
Speaker 1: dangerous that situation so that you're not putting human life
Speaker 1: at risk, but with the goal of being able to
Speaker 1: use it again and again and again. Right. So, but
Speaker 1: those robots probably don't need to have a lot of
Speaker 1: human interactivity. They're designed to do something that they're replacing
Speaker 1: a human, not interacting with a human. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, we are seeing this growing industry of robots
Speaker 1: that are designed to be around us in our daily lives,
Speaker 1: either as a telepresence style robot where the robot is
Speaker 1: standing in as a surrogate for an actual person, and
Speaker 1: you might have like an iPad or something like that
Speaker 1: as a head where someone can skype in. And this
Speaker 1: is always creepy whenever I see it done anywhere but
Speaker 1: I keep being told it's the way of the future.
Speaker 1: I have never actually interacted directly with one in an
Speaker 1: official capacity, but I've seen them at c ES. Now
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna make a reference to something that
Speaker 1: I have nothing, I have no personal interaction with. I
Speaker 1: believe my wife was telling me about a movie recently
Speaker 1: called her and it was a man who fell in
Speaker 1: love with the rating system and uh and the voice
Speaker 1: that that that that operating system had. Now I can
Speaker 1: see something like that. And let's see. You get a refrigerator,
Speaker 1: and refrigerators have screens on the Now ours does hear it?
Speaker 1: How stuff works? And it's got a screen, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't talk to us, But it does have a screen.
Speaker 1: You can interact, and there's a lot of different things
Speaker 1: you can do with that screen, including putting a wacky
Speaker 1: background image on it, as someone did when they put
Speaker 1: in the UM, the symbol for the evil organization from
Speaker 1: loss UM. I could see if if it was talking
Speaker 1: to you every day and had a likable voice, something
Speaker 1: that you felt comfortable interacting with um that you know,
Speaker 1: I could see somebody saying, why I'd be sad to
Speaker 1: get rid of that refrigerator in in five years. Well,
Speaker 1: especially if you would come home after a long day
Speaker 1: and your refrigerator says, hi, would you like a frosty
Speaker 1: adult beverage? I mean, you know you're gonna have a
Speaker 1: bond with that machine immediately. Yeah. So but there there's
Speaker 1: this whole discipline that's coming up, like how do we
Speaker 1: how do we define these interactions? How do we shape them? Uh?
Speaker 1: And a lot of it means you have to do
Speaker 1: study on both sides. You have to do a study
Speaker 1: on the robot side like what works and what doesn't,
Speaker 1: and you actually have to study human psychology how do
Speaker 1: humans respond to robots and at what point do humans
Speaker 1: end up treating robots as if they are alive, as
Speaker 1: if they're living creatures. And for a while people were thinking, um, well,
Speaker 1: the robot's gonna need to look like something biological already,
Speaker 1: Like it's gonna have to be like a robot dog
Speaker 1: or a robot you know, android type person, almost like
Speaker 1: a like a crash test dummy where it looks like
Speaker 1: a human but you can tell it's not a real human.
Speaker 1: And it turns out that's not necessarily true, because, as
Speaker 1: we've already said, people have been naming the room bus,
Speaker 1: people get emotionally invested. It turns out that we are
Speaker 1: if it looks animate, if it appears to behave based
Speaker 1: upon its own decisions, whether it's true or not. If
Speaker 1: it if it looks like it's doing that, we start
Speaker 1: to kind of in our minds give it these qualities.
Speaker 1: Scott and I have a lot more to talk about
Speaker 1: in this classic tech stuff episode, but first let's take
Speaker 1: a quick break to thank our sponsor. So a lot
Speaker 1: of this really was studying that, like this idea of
Speaker 1: the way people and machines are interacting and how that
Speaker 1: is becoming defined over time and what we might need
Speaker 1: to think about in that respect, and also just kind
Speaker 1: of a you know, it's a happy story about how
Speaker 1: people find joy in h a silly I mean, really
Speaker 1: you get down to it, it's a silly robot, not
Speaker 1: a bad robot. It's a silly robot. And and the
Speaker 1: the experience of discovery and sharing that with other people.
Speaker 1: That was a big part of this project too, and
Speaker 1: it was really successful for three out of the four
Speaker 1: big things that it did. The one that wasn't so
Speaker 1: successful and was the United States. So um, really quickly,
Speaker 1: before we get into the us stuff. I was going
Speaker 1: to talk about some of the folks who designed and
Speaker 1: came up with this idea. Uh. The two leads who
Speaker 1: first came up with the concept for Hitchbot, we're David
Speaker 1: Harris Smith and Franca Zeller. And I probably am mispronouncing
Speaker 1: Mrs Ellera Fraca Zeller. It's a name that I am.
Speaker 1: I was not familiar with, totally new for me. And
Speaker 1: they're out of port Credit, Ontario. Yes, and uh. Smith
Speaker 1: is assistant professor at McMaster University in the Department of
Speaker 1: Communication Studies. Zeller is an assistant professor in the School
Speaker 1: of Professional Communication at Ryerson University Communications professors. Now, this
Speaker 1: makes perfect sense because they're they're fishing for the way
Speaker 1: people interact with this. They want to find out exactly
Speaker 1: how people respond to this, how how he respond to them. Uh,
Speaker 1: this in reaction is really really interesting for these people
Speaker 1: in particular, I'm sure right. And Zella, she got her PhD.
Speaker 1: Her thesis was on human robot interaction. Well this is
Speaker 1: it then, Yeah, And they were joined by a lot
Speaker 1: of other people. I've just got a couple of names
Speaker 1: I'll mention, but the team itself is quite large. You
Speaker 1: can actually read up on all of them on the website.
Speaker 1: It's funny because the way the website is written, it's
Speaker 1: written from Hitchbot's perspective. So hitch it's Hitchbot saying, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is the person who helped me learn how to
Speaker 1: talk and it's very cute. This is the person that
Speaker 1: takes care of my electronics on a daily basis. I
Speaker 1: think they're about fourteen or fifteen people on that team.
Speaker 1: It's a big team. Is a large team, not just
Speaker 1: the two two leads here, right, So you've got people
Speaker 1: like a Colin or a Gadget who is a developer
Speaker 1: of hitchbot, and he's also a McMaster University student. He
Speaker 1: helped design and test hitchbot to make sure it would
Speaker 1: be able to withstand the various environments that it would encounter.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, this was summer in Canada, so it
Speaker 1: wasn't going to have to deal with a Canadian winter
Speaker 1: than summer. Yeah, it's a little bit different from the
Speaker 1: Atlanta summers. Slightly slightly less warm and humid, about sixty
Speaker 1: degrees cooler fahrenheit. That is, um, they're not Celsius. That
Speaker 1: would be pretty incredible. Uh So then you had Davin Bigelow,
Speaker 1: who was an undergraduate student at McMaster who worked on
Speaker 1: the conversational skills of this robot. Karen Veal birth Fish,
Speaker 1: who was another person who worked on Hitchbot's language skills.
Speaker 1: Dominic kal Kinn, whose undergraduate student at McMaster whose job
Speaker 1: was to monitor Hitchbot's status and make sure the robot
Speaker 1: was okay. So again, the robot was fitted with GPS
Speaker 1: and three G capability to essentially report back home saying
Speaker 1: here's where I'm at, be given time in every twenty minutes,
Speaker 1: he's getting a photograph sent from this robot to him
Speaker 1: to kind of update status where he is right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then uh, there was the big brother robot to Hitchbot,
Speaker 1: Culture bought k U L t U R. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: was this was a robot that preceded hitchpot. This was
Speaker 1: a different human robot interaction experiment. Culture bots job was
Speaker 1: to attend artistic exhibitions, take images of what was going on,
Speaker 1: tweet them, and critique them. It was a robotic art
Speaker 1: critic interesting anyway, so it would actually do the critique
Speaker 1: on the fly. They're like right there at the event.
Speaker 1: That's how it was described. But I didn't read enough
Speaker 1: into it to find out how this actually worked. Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it was capable of stringing together
Speaker 1: any words just based upon what it was seeing. I
Speaker 1: don't know if it had human intervention where the human
Speaker 1: was the one actually providing the caption. I don't know
Speaker 1: the answer to that, but I do know that that
Speaker 1: was essentially another project that was taken. Uh. That was
Speaker 1: that was being performed by much of the same team,
Speaker 1: and kind of the Hitchpot was kind of the next step,
Speaker 1: not directly connected. It was just one of those ideas
Speaker 1: that that Smith and and Zaler came up with that
Speaker 1: they thought was a really interesting concept. So after going
Speaker 1: through Canada, they went to Germany. It had a lot
Speaker 1: of adventures in Germany, went to castles, went to another wedding.
Speaker 1: There's a great picture of a bride giving Hitchpot a
Speaker 1: little kiss. That's just adorable. Yeah, and and uh, lots
Speaker 1: of stories of people. All of Hitchpot's journeys, by the way,
Speaker 1: are chronicled on the website. There are blog posts that
Speaker 1: tell what happened on each day. Some of them also
Speaker 1: have embedded videos of the stuff that went on and
Speaker 1: also photographs. It's very cute. Then after Germany, they went
Speaker 1: to the Netherlands for a brief while in the summer,
Speaker 1: early summer, for a bunch of activities and events that
Speaker 1: I cannot pronounce. Yes, I'm not even going to attempt
Speaker 1: a series of festivals with unpronounceable names. And then at
Speaker 1: least for the American tongue, and then uh, and then
Speaker 1: it moved over to the good old us of A. Yeah,
Speaker 1: started in Boston, right, it was gonna go from gonna
Speaker 1: go from Boston to San Francisco. That was the goal.
Speaker 1: That was the goal. And it also had a bucket list,
Speaker 1: which is appropriate since it was a bucket I have
Speaker 1: the bucket list in front of me now. Uh. While
Speaker 1: the bucket list has a couple of check marks on it. Now.
Speaker 1: One check mark was, um uh, to do the wave
Speaker 1: of a sports game anywhere, it didn't matter where it
Speaker 1: was to do that. Uh. The other one was to
Speaker 1: see the lights in Times Square, of course in New
Speaker 1: York City. And there were others. There's other stuff along
Speaker 1: the way, and I'll just mention a few of these
Speaker 1: because there's probably again different things in Grand Canyon has
Speaker 1: to be on there. Let's see Grand Canyon. Um uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll have to check out yes see the
Speaker 1: jaw dropping views of the Grand Canyon. That is one
Speaker 1: yes in Arizona. Um posed with the Lincoln Statue in
Speaker 1: d C was another one. Tan at Myrtle Beach Um
Speaker 1: experienced the magic of Walt Disney World in Florida. So
Speaker 1: it was going to need to actually go south along
Speaker 1: the Eastern Seaboard. I mean, for people who are not
Speaker 1: from the United States and aren't familiar with our geography,
Speaker 1: if you were going Boston to San Francisco, you would
Speaker 1: essentially be setting your sites west. Yeah, just do west,
Speaker 1: Just go yeah, just go west, and just keep on
Speaker 1: adjusting your your your journey in orders for you to
Speaker 1: get to California exactly. But with this list, it means
Speaker 1: that you would have need you first would need to
Speaker 1: go south, because you would have to go south from
Speaker 1: Boston to well to get to New York City, but
Speaker 1: also to d C and to Florida. And then this
Speaker 1: goes all over the place, I mean all over the Midwest.
Speaker 1: So there are things to do in Illinois like explore
Speaker 1: the cloud Gate in Millennium Park, um stand under the
Speaker 1: Gateway Arch in Missouri. Just all kinds of things like this,
Speaker 1: and again it's a it's a relatively long list and
Speaker 1: with many different states and many different activities, and checked
Speaker 1: off two items on that list. Yeah. And the reason
Speaker 1: that only two items were checked off is that Hitchbot
Speaker 1: met and untimely demise at the hands of a vandal
Speaker 1: maliciously murder yes, decapitated, we can we just can say
Speaker 1: murdered when it's a robot. I mean it was, I
Speaker 1: mean disassembled. Yeah, that's what Johnny five was scared about.
Speaker 1: No disassembled Johnny five. Um. Yeah, So I'm guessing disassembled
Speaker 1: is probably the best way of putting it. At some point,
Speaker 1: you figure there's gonna be another robot getting a delivery
Speaker 1: with a cardboard box and it'll just be what's in
Speaker 1: the box? Uh, and they'll have the binary uh code
Speaker 1: for seven as the title of that. Very clever, very clever.
Speaker 1: All right, So this is a weird, weird ending. So, um,
Speaker 1: it is the night prior to this, So it's it's
Speaker 1: what the end of July, right, because I think this
Speaker 1: all went down on August one, as when we heard
Speaker 1: exactly so July thirty one. Um, I think it was
Speaker 1: a Saturday night and Hitchbot was in Philadelphia and hanging
Speaker 1: out with a vlogger by the name of Jesse Wellens.
Speaker 1: And it is well documented what they did in their evening,
Speaker 1: during their evening because you know, Wellen's being a YouTube
Speaker 1: YouTube personality. Um, it took him on the town. You
Speaker 1: kind of did a lot of different things with him.
Speaker 1: There were other people involved. There's another guy um there
Speaker 1: with him. His name was Ed Bassmaster, who was another
Speaker 1: YouTube personality, and they had kind of a fun evening. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The whole the whole idea was that this is a
Speaker 1: I mean it was it was elevating Hitchbot's profile and
Speaker 1: elevating the YouTuber's profile. This is this is a dream
Speaker 1: come true for a YouTube personality because it gives you
Speaker 1: the chance to interact with a meme while it's at
Speaker 1: while it's happening. You're not capitalizing it on afterwards. This
Speaker 1: is this is like a once in a lifetime type deal.
Speaker 1: It can it can garner you at international attention immediately. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really would because people were tracking this thing. People
Speaker 1: are watching exactly where this is and they knew, you know,
Speaker 1: when it was when it was in their city. They
Speaker 1: knew where it was. They could walk I mean if
Speaker 1: it said, it's been sitting here at this corner of
Speaker 1: you know, Maine and Elm Street for the last twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: You could go down to Maine and Elm Street and
Speaker 1: look at this thing, or pick it up and give
Speaker 1: it a ride yourself or two. In fact, the early
Speaker 1: part of the trip we didn't talk about this, but
Speaker 1: it took a long time for it to leave the
Speaker 1: Boston area. People in Boston, we're taking it to different
Speaker 1: parks and different you know, they're kicking out on boats
Speaker 1: and things and taking you know, selfies with it, and um,
Speaker 1: it took I think it was more than seven days
Speaker 1: for it to get out of the Boston area, which
Speaker 1: I think the team would have found wonderful because it
Speaker 1: was what was happening was the robot was gathering a
Speaker 1: series of rich experiences, and the people were gathering the
Speaker 1: experience of interacting with the robot, which is the purpose
Speaker 1: for this thing in the first place. So having it
Speaker 1: take a really long time to get off any area
Speaker 1: would not be considered a a an impediment on the
Speaker 1: behalf of the people running the project. They I'm sure
Speaker 1: loved it. Oh yeah, in no way is that a failure.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a wind in fact, so you know
Speaker 1: here it is after this fun evening on the thirty one,
Speaker 1: and they placed it on the bench middle of the night.
Speaker 1: You know, it's late at night of course dark. They
Speaker 1: placed it on a park bench or not a park bench,
Speaker 1: but a bench on the city street there. And that's it.
Speaker 1: I mean, you see a cab driver arrive, think uh,
Speaker 1: And and that's it. I mean at the end of
Speaker 1: the video interaction with with Hitchpot at that point. And
Speaker 1: the next day we wake up to the news that
Speaker 1: Hitchbot has been murdered. Yes, its head had been removed
Speaker 1: from its torso and its arms ripped off. I gotta
Speaker 1: ask you this when you saw the photograph of Hitchbot,
Speaker 1: because and now this is a dramatic photograph, I mean
Speaker 1: it did. It did look a lot like a true
Speaker 1: crime scene photo in that horrific as this maybe. I mean,
Speaker 1: Hitchbot's arms were pulled off and placed above its head
Speaker 1: and um, he was laying in a pile of leaves.
Speaker 1: It's headless at this point, I mean, they're they're real
Speaker 1: crime scene photos like that. Now understand that this was starting,
Speaker 1: it was starting to feel like this is this is
Speaker 1: the robot equivalent of a serial killer a crime scene.
Speaker 1: So it was laid out in this light like the
Speaker 1: staged manner and u and very very oie, I guess.
Speaker 1: And there were actually websites or you know, blogs that
Speaker 1: would say, I don't really feel comfortable showing you this image,
Speaker 1: which is weird because here it's just a bucket with
Speaker 1: a couple of noodle arms and some some rubber boots. Right.
Speaker 1: If you saw this same collection of stuff and a
Speaker 1: hardware store, you would just think, oh, somebody just left
Speaker 1: their random shopping right here. That's pretty funny. I never
Speaker 1: thought it that way. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you could
Speaker 1: gather the stuff up the Walmart and put it on
Speaker 1: the floor and not think twice about it. But now
Speaker 1: that we know that this is this uh, this this
Speaker 1: thing that they've created that has a name, uh, now
Speaker 1: it takes on a different twist, doesn't it take? It
Speaker 1: takes a different different feel, which, again you might say,
Speaker 1: while while it brings the the that particular part of
Speaker 1: the experiment to an end, it also says a lot, right.
Speaker 1: It also tells you a lot about robot human interactions
Speaker 1: and where they can go. It sure does, and you're
Speaker 1: right away you would think, well, of course, Wellens and
Speaker 1: bass Master have done this. That's that's the two people,
Speaker 1: the two characters that were involved with this last and
Speaker 1: then lo and behold three or day later, two days
Speaker 1: later or whatever, there comes this uh secret surveillance video
Speaker 1: that was taken it in from a nearby store that
Speaker 1: shows what happened. And someone wanders up in a football
Speaker 1: jersey and just kicks the living heck out of this
Speaker 1: thing and destroys it. But it's it's shown just off screen.
Speaker 1: We don't actually see the person kicking and destroying this thing.
Speaker 1: We see him kicking in this destroying the area of
Speaker 1: the bench that that that hitchpot was known to be
Speaker 1: last right and then later uh, everyone was reporting that
Speaker 1: this video was essentially itself was staged. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: fake video because you can go to that scene and
Speaker 1: look exactly where it was taken from the same perspective.
Speaker 1: There's no camera there. Yeah, so it's a fake. And
Speaker 1: so what's going on here? Because they never have found
Speaker 1: the head of Hitchbot. I mean they never found the
Speaker 1: I guess the CPU, the the thing that would tell
Speaker 1: them PC. Yeah, that would tell them what is what
Speaker 1: is happening, like, what what happened to it? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: the best guess is just that somebody scavenged it. But
Speaker 1: you know, in fact that the people behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: the people behind the project, have said, we don't we
Speaker 1: don't care to identify the person who did it or
Speaker 1: why they did it. That's not important to what we
Speaker 1: were trying to do with the taking photographs every twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it captured something and sent it without
Speaker 1: the the the person, you know, the purp knowing what
Speaker 1: had happened, or if or if it just happened to
Speaker 1: default within that time frame between when the photos are
Speaker 1: taken and didn't capture anything, and it's just like everybody else,
Speaker 1: they don't know anything. It's possible either way. The you know,
Speaker 1: of course, there was a huge reaction to this, both ways. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were people who were saying, this is awful, this
Speaker 1: is the worst. You know. It really reflects poorly on
Speaker 1: the United States that a robot that was capable of
Speaker 1: safely traveling from one coast of Canada to the other,
Speaker 1: and also in Germany and also in the Netherlands, gets
Speaker 1: barely into its journey here in the United States before
Speaker 1: it's destroyed. Yeah, that that was a telling um condemnation,
Speaker 1: if you will, of the United States in general and
Speaker 1: Philadelphia in particular. You can think of all the different
Speaker 1: comments that were immediately happening afterwards. A lot of people
Speaker 1: say like, well, this happens to real hitchhikers as well,
Speaker 1: it happens to people. Well, and then there were a
Speaker 1: ton of comments that said, well, of course this happened
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia. Yeah, there's that. And there's another group of
Speaker 1: people that would just respond with something like a big deal,
Speaker 1: it was a bucket of bolts. Anyways, it was a machine, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean it's it's again. This ties right back
Speaker 1: into that robotic human interactions. You might think the experiments
Speaker 1: over I would argue that the team probably says, no,
Speaker 1: it's still going. It doesn't matter if the robot is gone.
Speaker 1: The continuing conversation around this is still informing us and
Speaker 1: still giving us a lot more adda about how humans
Speaker 1: view robots, how we can identify with them, we can
Speaker 1: imprint an emotional response to them, and in fact, they
Speaker 1: have tweeted out, you know, continuing to tweet out with
Speaker 1: the robots, saying the robot still loves people. Still loved
Speaker 1: its adventures, which I think needles it even more right.
Speaker 1: You made the robot this innocent creature. It reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of when, um, the various Mars rovers when
Speaker 1: they were like the Phoenix Lander, specifically, when it was
Speaker 1: nearing the end of its mission, like it had gone
Speaker 1: well beyond what the mission parameters were and it was
Speaker 1: to a point where it was no longer going to
Speaker 1: get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries, and it's essentially
Speaker 1: the social media team at NASA sent out a final
Speaker 1: tweet from the robot, keeping in mind the robot was
Speaker 1: never tweeting directly. It was always a human being taking
Speaker 1: data from the robot and then messaging it out. But
Speaker 1: people identified with that robot, and when that last tweet
Speaker 1: came out, people cry, isn't that crazy? Now? They're they're
Speaker 1: watching this thing and they're thinking, they're almost making it
Speaker 1: into like like it's like you're watching a dog or
Speaker 1: something like that. That's that's dying. That thing right there
Speaker 1: is dying and I'm watching it happen and they're not
Speaker 1: understanding that. It's like, um, now, I know it's way
Speaker 1: more complexness, but it's not like, well, it's time to
Speaker 1: get a new toaster. You know, it's not like a
Speaker 1: machine that you don't really have any kind of personal
Speaker 1: um attachment to ye attachment Like if my microwave were
Speaker 1: to malfunction, I think a lot of pain in the butt.
Speaker 1: I have to go and get a new one. If
Speaker 1: you're not gonna cry. No. But and again that that
Speaker 1: goes right back into that idea of how do robots
Speaker 1: and humans interact? And and we do need to think
Speaker 1: about this because if we enter into a world where
Speaker 1: we start treating these relationships is really casual. When stuff
Speaker 1: happens and people go through an actual grieving experience, we
Speaker 1: won't be ready for it. But if we know ahead
Speaker 1: of time, we can say, all right, you know what,
Speaker 1: we we know this about ourselves. This is something that
Speaker 1: is innately human, at least for many people realize that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you then you think, all right, now I
Speaker 1: can I can design a product and market a product
Speaker 1: and and do it in a responsible way that doesn't
Speaker 1: say this is a weird you know, aberration or anything. No,
Speaker 1: this is a very human kind of trait that a
Speaker 1: lot of people have. Sure, whatever elicits that response from
Speaker 1: the humans, that's what you're looking for, Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: or at least that you account for it. Even if
Speaker 1: that's not the purpose of whatever it is you're making,
Speaker 1: you at least account for the fact that it exists.
Speaker 1: We've got a little bit more to chat about when
Speaker 1: it comes to Hitchbot and to really kind of delve
Speaker 1: into the psychology behind humans and robot relations. And we'll
Speaker 1: get right to that in just a second, but first
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In
Speaker 1: the fallout of all of this, we've seen not just
Speaker 1: the condemnation of an act of violence against what seemed
Speaker 1: to be an innocent creature that loved adventure and meeting people, or,
Speaker 1: as Smith had called it, a story collecting and story
Speaker 1: generating machine, like that was its purpose. We've also seen
Speaker 1: people come together to say, we can't let this be
Speaker 1: the end of the story. Um. We there are a
Speaker 1: couple of different groups in Philadelphia that had said, let
Speaker 1: us build a robot two continue on in the spirit
Speaker 1: of Hitchbot, because I can't stand for hitchbot story to
Speaker 1: have ended in the city that I call home. Sure,
Speaker 1: let's so, let's let's have a chance to make this right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're going to do it. Yeah, so there are
Speaker 1: the tech community in Philadelphia has responded with this and
Speaker 1: actually received some more or less tentative thumbs up from
Speaker 1: some of the members of the Hitchpot team to give
Speaker 1: this a go. And so there's a group um at
Speaker 1: the gathered at the hactory. The hactory. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: a factory hactory in West Philadelphia. Um, this was this
Speaker 1: is very recent and when this happened. Uh, And they
Speaker 1: have come up with an idea that they're calling the
Speaker 1: Philly love Bot, which I don't like the sound of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: an odd choice for a name. Wait, but in the
Speaker 1: brotherly love. Okay, I don't want to I don't take
Speaker 1: this in the wrong direction or anything. But we're not
Speaker 1: talking about a sexpot. Okay, Okay, was a sex boy.
Speaker 1: I didn't want to just come right out and say it.
Speaker 1: But it seems like I've heard of products like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah no, not not that kind of love. But this
Speaker 1: is more of a love for all mankind and robots
Speaker 1: kind of what kind of bought podcast if I wandered
Speaker 1: into Yeah, no, I'm not gonna do another bait and
Speaker 1: switch on you, Scott. I already promised you. I wasn't
Speaker 1: gonna do that, not doing it this time, honest. So
Speaker 1: they said that the idea they have is they would
Speaker 1: build a robot that was designed to be passed from
Speaker 1: one person to another. So it's not designed to hitchhike
Speaker 1: from one location to another location. There's no location requirement,
Speaker 1: at least in their initial approach. Instead, what they want
Speaker 1: is to design a robot that when you, when you
Speaker 1: take possession of it, when someone gives it to you,
Speaker 1: you are tasked with performing a good deed, however you
Speaker 1: define it, and it gets documented by the robot itself.
Speaker 1: The robot you take along with you to do whatever
Speaker 1: this good deed maybe, and then you pass it on.
Speaker 1: It's like a pay it forward. You pass the robot
Speaker 1: onto someone else and it is their duty now to
Speaker 1: go out and do a good deed. And the idea
Speaker 1: to kind of a tone for the horrible murder of
Speaker 1: Hitchbot by promoting good deeds, and the robot is the
Speaker 1: kind of the almost like a totem for that. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say, I like this idea, but you could
Speaker 1: do the same thing with with a carved stick. You
Speaker 1: could hand a carved stick to somebody. Now that you're
Speaker 1: in possession of the stick, it's your duty to do
Speaker 1: a good deed and pass the stick onto somebody else.
Speaker 1: It doesn't have to be, uh, something that collects and
Speaker 1: gathers the information. But I guess that keeps everybody kind
Speaker 1: of honest, doesn't it. Well? Yeah, and I think also,
Speaker 1: you know you I. They also are planning on having
Speaker 1: the robot, which I am going to guess it is
Speaker 1: going to be another really another computer or not so
Speaker 1: much a robot. They're going to have it capable of
Speaker 1: interacting with you, just as the hitchbot could. So in
Speaker 1: other words, there will still be that robot human interaction
Speaker 1: element that will play a part in this experiment, but
Speaker 1: the nature of the the overall experiment, the the perceived
Speaker 1: purpose will be different, now, isn't It's funny because I
Speaker 1: wonder what some people are going to consider a good
Speaker 1: deed too, because there might be some comical examples of
Speaker 1: what people consider to be their good deed for humanity,
Speaker 1: like one I I. Yeah, I imagine we would see
Speaker 1: everything from someone saying, all right, I'm gonna take this
Speaker 1: robot with me while me and my company while we
Speaker 1: go out and we clean up a neighborhood. That could
Speaker 1: be one, or it could be I'm going to set
Speaker 1: this robot here on the corner so it can watch
Speaker 1: me as I stopped traffic so this mama duck and
Speaker 1: her baby ducks can get across the street. It could
Speaker 1: be anything. Yeah, like oh man, you almost spilled your beer,
Speaker 1: but I I saved you. I'm passing this thing on
Speaker 1: and see that that also again because of you Look,
Speaker 1: if you look at it as the as an experiment,
Speaker 1: that's still meaningful data. Right. That's true. It's it's interesting,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of like a joke, but it's
Speaker 1: also that's humanity too, that's true. And that's exactly what
Speaker 1: the initial goal of this whole thing was. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's to see what happens. It wasn't the goal of
Speaker 1: getting this thing across Canada. But they can put in
Speaker 1: a box and ship if they want, or just have
Speaker 1: a trucking company hall it. Like we said, you know,
Speaker 1: one shot all the way straight across. But the idea
Speaker 1: was to see what happens along the way. It's like
Speaker 1: the journey is better than the destination exactly. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that it's those experience is that we're important and that
Speaker 1: documenting culture, and we're talking about an emerging culture now,
Speaker 1: not just tradition, not just the embedded culture that's been
Speaker 1: around for generations. We're talking about an emerging culture of
Speaker 1: technology and our daily lives intermingling on a level that
Speaker 1: has been it's unprecedented. We've never seen it like that,
Speaker 1: and it grows every day, so fascinating, really a fascinating experiment.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't call it a failure at all. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sad that the Hitchbot didn't get further along in
Speaker 1: its journey so that more people could experience it and
Speaker 1: that we could have more stories. But it's all right,
Speaker 1: because the story continues. It's just the Hitchbot chapter is over.
Speaker 1: So when you look at it that way, it's actually
Speaker 1: really interesting and inspiring. And you know, of course, you
Speaker 1: might say, well, I hope that the next robot meets
Speaker 1: with more success and doesn't have the same kind of encounter.
Speaker 1: But if we do see these kind of encounters happen
Speaker 1: again and again, then we have new questions to ask, like,
Speaker 1: why is this happening? Uh? You know, what are what
Speaker 1: are the motivations behind it? Are there things we need
Speaker 1: to look at as a as a society, not just
Speaker 1: not because we want to protect robots, but are there
Speaker 1: underlying issues that this is just an indicator of it,
Speaker 1: and maybe there are things we need to fix. It's
Speaker 1: a real anger, some deep seated anger against robots, or
Speaker 1: or even just one of those situations where clearly the
Speaker 1: person who was trying to scavenge it wanted to get
Speaker 1: it for the parts to sell for some reasons, and
Speaker 1: then that's well, if that's in fact the answer, then
Speaker 1: you're you. You might say, all right, you know, this
Speaker 1: is yet another indicator that there are conditions that maybe
Speaker 1: we should look at and really talk about. And yes,
Speaker 1: this is a kind of trivial way of highlighting that,
Speaker 1: and it's stuff that we already know, but it's another
Speaker 1: way to say, think about this. I mean, we're really
Speaker 1: we're really talking about compassion, and on a level, that
Speaker 1: is a very you know, human trait, a very innate
Speaker 1: trait in us. Maybe we should apply that to our
Speaker 1: fellow humans, to not just to the robots, even even
Speaker 1: the even the humans that caused damage to the robots,
Speaker 1: we should show compassion too, because we don't know the
Speaker 1: reason behind it, and there may be reasons that we
Speaker 1: can't even identify with because we're not in that situation,
Speaker 1: and that's all the more reason to show compassion. And
Speaker 1: that's exactly what they're Again, I keep going back this,
Speaker 1: but that's exactly what they were looking for when they
Speaker 1: started this whole experiment a couple of years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So this has really been fascinating and I can't wait
Speaker 1: to see what the next phase will bring to us.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you one question before we leave here?
Speaker 1: And I think we had discussed this, but only briefly
Speaker 1: and we didn't really get into much detail. But um,
Speaker 1: had you not known about hitchpot, right, had you never
Speaker 1: heard of this whole thing exactly you passed it on
Speaker 1: the on the city streets driving, would you have stopped
Speaker 1: the pick it up? None a chance at all that
Speaker 1: I would stop because and you made me think about
Speaker 1: this because I was coming to it from the perspective
Speaker 1: of knowing about Hitchbot. If I saw hitch Bot, I'd think,
Speaker 1: holy crap, there's the hitchhiking robot. We've got to take
Speaker 1: part in this. This is something special and I feel
Speaker 1: the exact same way. But not knowing about Hitchbot, not
Speaker 1: knowing about it and seeing a bucket that has electronics
Speaker 1: attached to it, even with the happy face, maybe particularly
Speaker 1: with the happy face, I might think, oh, what this
Speaker 1: is like a suspicious device of some sort. I thought,
Speaker 1: I said, it looks a lot, an awful lot like
Speaker 1: an I E. D. And I thought it's not too
Speaker 1: far off in the description. I know that they're a
Speaker 1: little more um I guess camouflaged in the way that
Speaker 1: they typically do those things. But this just seems to
Speaker 1: me like not a good idea to pick something up, like,
Speaker 1: you know, something like this up on the street and
Speaker 1: you know, strap it in the car next your kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not really, but I mean, knowing what it is, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course you want to do that. You'd want to
Speaker 1: you know, it'd be a great experience for you and
Speaker 1: your family, you know, to to do something with us,
Speaker 1: even if you drive it a mile or five miles
Speaker 1: or whatever. Just take a quick photograph with it and
Speaker 1: say you were part of that journey. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 1: It's actually kind of interesting to me that Hitchbot spent
Speaker 1: seven days in Boston because Boston is also where we
Speaker 1: had the Aquitine Hunger Force Moon andite bomb scare. It
Speaker 1: was in two thousand seven and it was in Boston.
Speaker 1: For it was in Boston. Yeah, yeah, that's with the
Speaker 1: neon or not in the it. I'm sorry l E
Speaker 1: D Yeah, um well yeah, yeah, you can tell him
Speaker 1: what it was. Yeah, the the l E ed there.
Speaker 1: There were these two characters from Aquitine Hunger Force, these
Speaker 1: two Moononites from the Moon. They look like uh like yeah,
Speaker 1: the eight bit characters from a really crappy video game
Speaker 1: that they're specifically made to look like that they're two dimensional.
Speaker 1: They're they when they turn sideways, you don't see him
Speaker 1: anymore because they're gone. And also they're hilarious. They are hilarious.
Speaker 1: They are incredible, inappropriate, as is everything on Aquitine Hunger Force,
Speaker 1: but they are hilarious. And there was a publicity stunt
Speaker 1: where uh these led signs of the two characters were
Speaker 1: put up in various locations, and in Boston it caused
Speaker 1: a bomb scare. People thought that maybe it was the
Speaker 1: indication of an explosive device nearby, and so they were dismantled,
Speaker 1: and it very quickly became kind of a joke slash
Speaker 1: a discussion about you have to be very careful in
Speaker 1: the way you present these kind of guerrilla marketing attempts
Speaker 1: because in a in a post nine eleven world, they
Speaker 1: can be misinterpreted. It was post nine eleven and pre
Speaker 1: marathon bombing too, yeah, so it's kind of in between.
Speaker 1: But they were on high alert there for a while
Speaker 1: about these signs, and then you know, sheepishly Cartoon Network
Speaker 1: had to say, oh, that was us, yeah, and I
Speaker 1: here's what happened. But in fact they were a little
Speaker 1: reluctant to say that was us. Well, but you know,
Speaker 1: then again bad press is still pressed. That's true. So
Speaker 1: I'm actually amazed that the that hitchbot didn't meet with
Speaker 1: any hitches in Boston based on that um and the
Speaker 1: and as you when you asked that question, you gave
Speaker 1: the qualifier, Hey, you've never heard of hitchbot and you
Speaker 1: see this thing on the side of the road. I
Speaker 1: definitely would have wondered what the heck it was, and
Speaker 1: I probably would have thought I might not want to
Speaker 1: get too close to that just in case. Yeah. Sure,
Speaker 1: And imagine if you were, you know somewhere in Canada,
Speaker 1: you know where it's it's wide open farmland and uh,
Speaker 1: you know there's it's it's a mile between houses and
Speaker 1: this thing is propped up on it's it's it's legs
Speaker 1: and its tripods seat there out in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: I don't think i'd stopped. And in that case, I
Speaker 1: probably would stop only because I would think, who the
Speaker 1: heck would set up something sinister in the middle of
Speaker 1: nowhere where you are not likely to affect much of
Speaker 1: anything at all, and that's how they get you, Whereas
Speaker 1: I would be more concerned about the the city location,
Speaker 1: where the the opportunity is higher, you know. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just see it as like, and that was the last
Speaker 1: thing that he thought. Well, I already told you that
Speaker 1: I was worried that my obituary from yesterday was going
Speaker 1: to say choked to death on twizzlers. So it's actually
Speaker 1: much worse. Yeah, no, especially since I hate twizzlers all right. Well,
Speaker 1: at any rate, this was really a lot of fun
Speaker 1: to talk about, and it was fun to kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, think about the weird adventures, which are all,
Speaker 1: like I said, documented. You can go to the hitchbot
Speaker 1: website and read up on the different days and events
Speaker 1: and things that it encountered, the people it met, so
Speaker 1: many successful journeys and so many events and things that
Speaker 1: had happened, that happened, and and it posted about all
Speaker 1: that stuff, and all his interactions are recorded in some way,
Speaker 1: which is great, so you can actually go back and
Speaker 1: relive those journeys. And I do hope that we see
Speaker 1: some further experiments that that are in the same spirit,
Speaker 1: whether or not it's another hitchhiking thing or it's like
Speaker 1: the Philly love body or so. I know, it's like,
Speaker 1: it's like I'm ten years old. I can't you can't
Speaker 1: say that, and I still giggle every time. But you know,
Speaker 1: I see what you mean. I anticipate a bunch of
Speaker 1: copycat hitchpots popping up. Um, here's another little thing that
Speaker 1: I I we didn't get to really talk about this,
Speaker 1: but I think the very next thing we're going to
Speaker 1: see out of this unfortunately, and this is just my
Speaker 1: gut feeling. You said, somebody probably scrapped the head, you know,
Speaker 1: the control unit. I have a feeling we're going to
Speaker 1: see a photograph of that show up somewhere that's gonna
Speaker 1: be sent to the creators of a hitch Pot, which
Speaker 1: to the creators probably would just be yet another data point. Probably, Yeah,
Speaker 1: But I I see it as going like the way
Speaker 1: a real crime against a human would have gone, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and that there will be next a kind
Speaker 1: of a taunting note sent to them as well, which
Speaker 1: you know, I hope I'm wrong that if that does happen, though,
Speaker 1: it is interesting because it's just that whoever does it
Speaker 1: obviously would think of it as uh or I would
Speaker 1: guess this is armchair psychology, but I would imagine that
Speaker 1: they would think of it as like a joke. That
Speaker 1: you know, I'm treating this as if it were a
Speaker 1: real person. Meanwhile, there are other people who think that's
Speaker 1: sick because they do think of Hitchpot as at least
Speaker 1: some in some way similar to a person. And this
Speaker 1: is again so that we're clear here. I read a
Speaker 1: lot of true crimes. So it's not that I'm just
Speaker 1: thinking about this all the time. I mean, I'm just
Speaker 1: saying around the one year anniversary, just pay attention to
Speaker 1: what's going on the news. It might happen, might not happen.
Speaker 1: I don't have any insight info or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I could just as easily be that someone saw it
Speaker 1: and thought, oh I want a tablet. PC could be
Speaker 1: and it could it could have ended up in a dumpster,
Speaker 1: half a block away. Yeah, yeah, it's it's hard to say,
Speaker 1: but this was a lot of fun. Scott, thank you
Speaker 1: for coming on the show. Thank you again. I appreciate it,
Speaker 1: and likewise I had a good time doing it. Fantastic.
Speaker 1: If you guys want to listen to more amazing content
Speaker 1: that Scott and Ben generate all the time, you've got
Speaker 1: to check out car Stuff. It's great, show sucks, it's
Speaker 1: it's tons of fun. I've I've had so much fun
Speaker 1: listening to those episodes. Uh, I thought you were gonna
Speaker 1: say those clowns right there, he said, I had so
Speaker 1: much fun listening to and there's a little pause, and well,
Speaker 1: that's true outside of the room, I like in the
Speaker 1: studio or in the office rather well. I appreciate it,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Yeah. So, guys, if you have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future topics or you have you know,
Speaker 1: your own perspective on hitchpot and what that experiment was
Speaker 1: all about, let me know. Send me an email the
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or
Speaker 1: you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter
Speaker 1: the handle of both of those tech Stuff h s
Speaker 1: W and I'll talk to you again Lily soon. For
Speaker 1: more on this and bassans of other topics because it
Speaker 1: has to works. Dot com