Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heeart Radio
Speaker 1: and how the tech are you? It is a Friday,
Speaker 1: which means it's time for a tech Stuff classic episode.
Speaker 1: This episode is called the Sad Tale of hitch Bot,
Speaker 1: and in many ways it's another example of comparing the
Speaker 1: cultures of Canada versus that of the United States. Scott
Speaker 1: Benjamin was on hand to serve as a guest host
Speaker 1: in this episode, and it originally published on August twenty four,
Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen. Let's listen in let me paint you
Speaker 1: a word picture Scott. On July two thousand fourteen, Hitchhiker
Speaker 1: began a historic journey from Halifax Nova's Scotia to get
Speaker 1: 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 d 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. 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. That is weird. Yeah, not a person.
Speaker 1: I've never picked up a hitchhicker. 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 that
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: robot to hitchhike across all of Canada successful. It was successful,
Speaker 1: so spoiler alert there, and then went on to do
Speaker 1: this again in Germany. It went all over Germany, and
Speaker 1: it also took a little vacation in the Netherlands. And
Speaker 1: then finally there was an attempt for this robot to
Speaker 1: hitchhike it's way across the United States, which was cut
Speaker 1: 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 at here. I
Speaker 1: think it's because the form factor makes it look sort
Speaker 1: of like a robot. Uh. And it definitely had the
Speaker 1: benefit of having like a light display that that made
Speaker 1: a very simple smiley face, so you had kind of
Speaker 1: a you know, ahead that you could identify. But really
Speaker 1: we're really talking about a hitchhiking computer. It's just a
Speaker 1: hitchhiking computer that was in a more or less static
Speaker 1: robot body. It's simple, but they found a way to
Speaker 1: anthropomorphosize this thing to the point where people look at
Speaker 1: it and said, oh, that's kind of cute. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it has a torso, it's got arms and legs. Arms
Speaker 1: and legs don't move. The torso is static. Torsos a
Speaker 1: bucket um literally buck yeah, and literally a bucket. It
Speaker 1: does have solar panels that are arranged on the outside
Speaker 1: of the bucket, so that's one of the ways that
Speaker 1: the robot gets electricity. The other is that it will
Speaker 1: ask people to plug it into the lighter socket on
Speaker 1: a in a car. Yeah, it's only about three feet tall,
Speaker 1: so it's very small. That's waterproof, which is kind of surprising.
Speaker 1: It's waterproof. It does well and also, I mean it
Speaker 1: wears waterproof boots. Every single article, every article without fail,
Speaker 1: talks about the fact that it wears Wellies. The brand
Speaker 1: name boot. Yeah, okay, like a like a rubber boot.
Speaker 1: It's a named to the Duke of Wellington. Well It's
Speaker 1: arms are what pool noodles, so you know, it's not
Speaker 1: it's not like they went to two great lengths to
Speaker 1: try to make this thing look human or anything like that.
Speaker 1: But it does have arms and legs. It does have
Speaker 1: a face as you mentioned, has um A. It almost
Speaker 1: looks like a tupperware container on the top looks like
Speaker 1: a hat, a beret or something like that. That's designed
Speaker 1: to to actually protect the the electronics, the tablet computer
Speaker 1: that is running the software that the robot so used
Speaker 1: likely part of the waterproofing overall, I guess, and um
Speaker 1: it's GPS equipped. The thing weighs about twenty five pounds total,
Speaker 1: so it's not that heavy. Really has its own built
Speaker 1: in seat that it's like a car seat almost that well,
Speaker 1: it is a car seat from a kid's car seat
Speaker 1: that you can then put in your car and buckle in,
Speaker 1: so it's secure when it's in there. It's not gonna
Speaker 1: fly around the vehicle loose, you know, it's something were
Speaker 1: to happen, right, And and it's legs are not powered,
Speaker 1: they are statics. So the way that you would set
Speaker 1: this up when you are done carrying it as far
Speaker 1: as you want to carry it is the seat also
Speaker 1: has essentially a lever that can fold down into a
Speaker 1: tripod like position, so the two legs act as two
Speaker 1: of the legs of the tripod. This lever access the
Speaker 1: third and if you were to pick it up, you
Speaker 1: could fold that arm back up against the seat, so
Speaker 1: that would allow you to put it into your vehicle
Speaker 1: and secure the car seat there. And that's if you
Speaker 1: were in an area that you wanted to set it
Speaker 1: up on the side of the road that was you know,
Speaker 1: like a field or something where there's nowhere for it
Speaker 1: to sit, like on a bench or maybe in a
Speaker 1: wall or something right that right, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: like I said, it was running on essentially a tablet
Speaker 1: PC that if you looked at all the equipment according
Speaker 1: to the website, uh, it cost about a thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: maybe a little less, And that was a calculated decision.
Speaker 1: They wanted that. They, being the team behind this, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk about them in a second, wanted the robot
Speaker 1: to be inexpensive enough where it would not be an
Speaker 1: obvious target for someone to just steal the components out
Speaker 1: of it. They wanted it to be uh uh accessible.
Speaker 1: They wanted it to be cute. They wanted it to
Speaker 1: be something that people would want to interact with and
Speaker 1: to have enough of an ability to have interactions, including
Speaker 1: holding a conversation sort of ye kind of yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: we're being real generous with the term conversation. That's one
Speaker 1: thing that you and I talked about off air is
Speaker 1: that every conversation we've ever seen with this, you know
Speaker 1: that between a human and hitchpot it was awkward to
Speaker 1: say the least. I mean it was it kind of
Speaker 1: it kind of picked up on what what the even
Speaker 1: was saying, but not entirely didn't quite get the gist
Speaker 1: of the conversation, and it would respond in an awkward way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it had It had a microphone so it could pick
Speaker 1: up on what people were saying, and a speaker so
Speaker 1: it could then return and communicate back. And a big
Speaker 1: problem with that was probably the the vast array of
Speaker 1: dialects that was dealing with, right, and just the fact
Speaker 1: that our spoken language is incredibly plastic and adaptive and
Speaker 1: there are so many different ways to say the same
Speaker 1: thing that it can be difficult for you know, it's
Speaker 1: like a non native speaker of any language, you might
Speaker 1: be taught how to say or ask for something a
Speaker 1: very specific way, and that specific way is still correct,
Speaker 1: it's not incorrect, but it's just one way to say that,
Speaker 1: to express that thought. And in most languages there are
Speaker 1: lots of different ways to express the same thought, and
Speaker 1: you're familiar with one of them, so if anyone comes
Speaker 1: up to you and uses a different one, you could
Speaker 1: be completely confused, even though you know one way of
Speaker 1: saying it that you understand all these other ways don't.
Speaker 1: Same thing with computers. If you train a computer using
Speaker 1: machine learning on what certain phrases mean, that's great, the
Speaker 1: computer might be able to identify that. But if someone
Speaker 1: were to ask for the same sort of thing but
Speaker 1: word it slightly differently, that can be enough to throw
Speaker 1: a computer off, because these are subtle things that we
Speaker 1: humans can into tively grasp, but computers lack intuition. And
Speaker 1: there's not only the word problem. There's also the way
Speaker 1: that it's said. So the you know, the the regions,
Speaker 1: the zones, like you know, here in the South, people
Speaker 1: talk different than they do in the Pacific, or the
Speaker 1: Pacific Northwest for the or the Northeast or you know,
Speaker 1: the South, the Northeast talk faster than I can hear. Yeah,
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 I had no 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 in
Speaker 1: robot human interactions. Yeah, because the thing could have been
Speaker 1: picked up right at the right at the start, right
Speaker 1: at the very first day, and driven all the way
Speaker 1: across by one person, you know, on a long haul
Speaker 1: truck or something, and what would be the adventure and
Speaker 1: that what would be the fun. The idea was that
Speaker 1: this relies on um, human interaction and human kindness to
Speaker 1: get this thing from one place to the next, kind
Speaker 1: of to take care of this thing and along the
Speaker 1: way have kind of a checklist of things that they
Speaker 1: wanted to do. Now, I don't know if the Canadian
Speaker 1: trip had a checklist. I don't think it did. Uh.
Speaker 1: The USA trip did have a checklist, which was was
Speaker 1: started um. But the Canadian trip um, you know, just
Speaker 1: for instance, you know, twenty six days to get across um,
Speaker 1: you know, the entire nation there. But it did things
Speaker 1: like attend to wedding, um, it was dancing in Saskatchewan.
Speaker 1: It it met some of the Canadians First Nations people, uh,
Speaker 1: some of the Aboriginal people um that were um, you know,
Speaker 1: native to Canada. And it did all kinds of things.
Speaker 1: I mean, it went to you know, parks, it went
Speaker 1: to scenic locations, um. All the time. It was snapping
Speaker 1: photographs because this program to take a photo every twenty
Speaker 1: minutes and it could tweet out that information, so it's
Speaker 1: interactions were uh doubled, and that it could interact in
Speaker 1: person to people who are around it and actually attempt
Speaker 1: to have a conversation and interject. In fact, I read
Speaker 1: one report of people who had picked up the robot
Speaker 1: and they said, yeah, it was weird. There were three
Speaker 1: of us in the car plus the robot, and we
Speaker 1: would the three of us be talking, and the robot
Speaker 1: would interject and interrupt us and often say something that
Speaker 1: is completely not connected to any of the rest of
Speaker 1: the conversation. And I thought, I've written in cars with
Speaker 1: people like that, you know, just just someone just pipes
Speaker 1: up with a total non sequite or and you think,
Speaker 1: are are we in a car with a crazy person?
Speaker 1: What's that have to do with the price of eggs
Speaker 1: in China? Yeah, something along those lines, And so, uh,
Speaker 1: you know that that was definitely part of it. I
Speaker 1: think there was certainly and an element of let's see
Speaker 1: how humans treat robots and also let's see how we
Speaker 1: can design a robot that from the get go is
Speaker 1: meant to interact with humans. Because One of the things
Speaker 1: we're starting to see increasingly in technology is the robotic
Speaker 1: sphere and the human sphere colliding like there and and
Speaker 1: by design, we want robots in our lives. People have
Speaker 1: named their room bas for example, they have given their
Speaker 1: room bas uh. You know, they've they've imprinted upon them
Speaker 1: this idea of a personality when something happens to the room.
Speaker 1: But you know, I'm sad, you're going to be well,
Speaker 1: i'd be sad to be out, you know, two bucks.
Speaker 1: That's another there's that side. But you know, if something
Speaker 1: happens to Fred, yeah, don't name your room BA. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's true. Is a lot of people do name
Speaker 1: these these robots. People get emotionally invested in these machines.
Speaker 1: And so there is this growing field of research of
Speaker 1: human robotic interactions. How can we one capitalize on this
Speaker 1: need for humans to have an emotional attachment to these
Speaker 1: these otherwise emotionless beings, these beings that lack of consciousness,
Speaker 1: lack emotions. How can we capitalize on that so that
Speaker 1: the interactions are are useful and meaningful in some way,
Speaker 1: even if it's only meaningful for the human if it's
Speaker 1: impossible for it to be meaningful for the robot, that's
Speaker 1: okay if it's still meaningful for the human or how
Speaker 1: do we design robots that are specifically meant to not
Speaker 1: evoke that reaction because it would be just you know,
Speaker 1: another distraction from whatever the robot is supposed to do.
Speaker 1: Or maybe that whatever the robot is supposed to do
Speaker 1: is inherently dangerous and should not you know, you don't
Speaker 1: want to encourage human interaction if if a robot is
Speaker 1: meant to do something like dig into rubble, you don't
Speaker 1: want people to you know, worry about the robot. The
Speaker 1: whole reason the robots digging into rouble in the first
Speaker 1: place is likely to look for survivors in the in
Speaker 1: the fall out of a building collapse or something, or
Speaker 1: well just to prevent having to have a human do
Speaker 1: the same thing. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, and that's really
Speaker 1: I mean, the way that a lot of robotics experts
Speaker 1: see robots really taking off, at least in the near future,
Speaker 1: is they'll be used to do jobs that are either
Speaker 1: too dirty, dull, or dangerous for humans. So jobs that
Speaker 1: are incredibly repetitive and don't require much thought robots are
Speaker 1: perfect for that. Also, robots don't sustain like repetitive injuries.
Speaker 1: You know, you do have to continuously maintain them. You
Speaker 1: can't just expect them to work forever. But they don't
Speaker 1: get carbal tunnel syndrome for unless they fix themselves. Right,
Speaker 1: and we we will get to that point eventually. And
Speaker 1: dangerous Obviously, you don't want, you know, you would want
Speaker 1: to be able to use a robot in a dangerous situation,
Speaker 1: so that you're not putting human life at risk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but with the goal of being able to use it
Speaker 1: again and again and again. Right. So, but those robots
Speaker 1: probably don't need to have a lot of human interactivity.
Speaker 1: They're designed to do something that they're replacing a human,
Speaker 1: not interacting with a human. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: we are seeing this growing industry of robots that are
Speaker 1: designed to be around us in our daily lives, either
Speaker 1: as a telepresence style robot where the robot is standing
Speaker 1: in as a surrogate for an actual person, and you
Speaker 1: might have like an iPad or something like that as
Speaker 1: a head where someone can skype in. And this is
Speaker 1: always creepy whenever I see it done anywhere, but I
Speaker 1: keep being told it's the way of the future. I
Speaker 1: have never actually interacted directly with one in an official capacity,
Speaker 1: but I've seen them at CS. Now I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna make a reference to something that I have nothing,
Speaker 1: I have no personal interaction with. I believe my wife
Speaker 1: was telling me about a movie recently called Her and
Speaker 1: it was a man who fell in love with the
Speaker 1: operating system and end of voice that that that that
Speaker 1: operating system had. Now I can see something like that.
Speaker 1: And let's say you get a refrigerator, and refrigerators have
Speaker 1: screens on the Now ours does hear it how stuff works?
Speaker 1: And it's got a screen but doesn't talk to us,
Speaker 1: But it does have a screen. You can interact, and
Speaker 1: there's a lot of different things you can do with
Speaker 1: that screen, including putting a wacky background image on it,
Speaker 1: as someone did when they put in the UM, the
Speaker 1: symbol for the evil organization from loss UM. I could
Speaker 1: see if if it was talking to you every day,
Speaker 1: and it had a likable voice, something that you felt
Speaker 1: comfortable interacting with um that you know, I could see
Speaker 1: somebody saying, why I'd be sad to get rid of
Speaker 1: that refrigerator in in five years? Well, especially if you
Speaker 1: would come home after a long day and your refrigerator says, Hi,
Speaker 1: would you like a frosty adult beverage? I mean you
Speaker 1: know you're gonna have a bond with that machine immediately. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's this whole discipline that's coming up, like how
Speaker 1: do we how do we define these interactions? How do
Speaker 1: we shape them? Uh? And a lot of it means
Speaker 1: you have to do study on both sides. You have
Speaker 1: to do a study on the robot side like what
Speaker 1: works and what doesn't, and you actually have to study
Speaker 1: human psychology how do humans respond to robots and at
Speaker 1: what point do humans end up treating robots as if
Speaker 1: they are alive, as if they're living creatures. And for
Speaker 1: a while people were thinking, um, well, the robot's gonna
Speaker 1: need to look like something biological already, Like it's gonna
Speaker 1: have to be like a robot dog or a robot
Speaker 1: you know, android type person, almost like a crash test
Speaker 1: where it looks like a human but you can tell
Speaker 1: it's not a real human. And it turns out that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily true, because as we've already said, people have
Speaker 1: been naming the room bas people get emotionally invested. It
Speaker 1: turns out that we are if it looks animate, if
Speaker 1: it appears to behave based upon its own decisions, whether
Speaker 1: it's true or not. If it if it looks like
Speaker 1: it's doing that, we start to kind of in our
Speaker 1: minds give it these qualities. We'll be back with more
Speaker 1: of the sad tale of Hitchbot after these messages. So
Speaker 1: a lot of this really was studying that, like this
Speaker 1: idea of the way people and machines are interacting and
Speaker 1: how that is becoming defined over time and what we
Speaker 1: might need to think about in that respect, and also
Speaker 1: just kind of a you know, it's a happy story
Speaker 1: about how people find joy in h a silly I mean,
Speaker 1: really you get down to it, it's a silly robot,
Speaker 1: not a bad robot. It's a silly robot. And and
Speaker 1: the 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 Traca Zella. 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 in response to them. Uh,
Speaker 1: this interaction is really really interesting for these people and
Speaker 1: particul I'm sure right. And Zeller she got her PhD.
Speaker 1: Her thesis was on human robot interaction, is it then? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they were joined by a lot of other people.
Speaker 1: I've just got a couple of names I'll mention, but
Speaker 1: the team itself is quite large. You can actually read
Speaker 1: up on all of them on the website. It's funny
Speaker 1: because the way the website is written, it's written from
Speaker 1: Hitchbot's perspective. So hitch it's hitchbot saying, Oh, this is
Speaker 1: the person who helped me learn how to talk and
Speaker 1: it's very cute. This is the person that takes care
Speaker 1: of my electronics. Yes, on a daily basis. I think
Speaker 1: they're about fourteen or fifteen people on that team. It's
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 hitchbot,
Speaker 1: and he's also a McMaster University student. He helped design
Speaker 1: and test hitchbot to make sure it would be able
Speaker 1: to withstand the various environments that it would encounter. Keep
Speaker 1: in mind, this was summer in Canada, so it wasn't
Speaker 1: going to have to deal with a Canadian winter than summer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit different from the Atlanta summers. Slightly
Speaker 1: slightly less warm and humid, about sixty degrees cooler fahrenheit.
Speaker 1: That is, um, they're not Celsius. That would be pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: Uh So, then you had Davin Bigelow, who was an
Speaker 1: undergraduate student at McMaster who worked on the conversational skills
Speaker 1: of this robot. Karen Veal birth Fish, who was another
Speaker 1: person who worked on Hitchbot's language skills, Dominic kal Kinn,
Speaker 1: whose undergraduate student at McMaster whose job was to monitor
Speaker 1: Hitchbot's status and make sure the robot was okay. So again,
Speaker 1: the robot was fitted with GPS and three G capability
Speaker 1: to essentially report back home saying here's where I'm at,
Speaker 1: being given time in every twenty minutes, he's getting a
Speaker 1: photograph sent from this robot to him to kind of
Speaker 1: update status where he is right now. Yeah, and then uh,
Speaker 1: there was the big brother robot to Hitchbot, culture Bot
Speaker 1: k U L t u are. But yeah, this was
Speaker 1: this was a robot that preceded hitchpot. This was a
Speaker 1: different human robot interaction experiment. Culture Bod's job was to
Speaker 1: 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. Fascinating, but I do know that
Speaker 1: that was essentially another project that was taken Uh. That
Speaker 1: was 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 Seller came up with that they
Speaker 1: thought was a really interesting concept. So after going through Canada,
Speaker 1: they went to Germany. It had a lot of adventures
Speaker 1: in Germany, went to castles, went to another wedding. There's
Speaker 1: a great picture of a bride giving Hitchpot a little kiss.
Speaker 1: Yeah and um and uh. Lots of stories of people.
Speaker 1: All of Hitchpot's journeys, by the way, are chronicled on
Speaker 1: the website. There are blog posts that tell what happened
Speaker 1: on each day. Some of them also have embedded videos
Speaker 1: of the stuff that went on and also photographs. It's
Speaker 1: very cute. Then after Germany, they went to the Netherlands
Speaker 1: for a brief while in the summer early summer, for
Speaker 1: a bunch of activities and events that I cannot pronounce. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm not even going to attempt a series of festivals
Speaker 1: with unpronounceable names. And then at least for the American tongue.
Speaker 1: And then uh, and then it moved over to the
Speaker 1: good old us of a Ya started in Boston, right,
Speaker 1: it was gonna go from We're gonna go from Boston
Speaker 1: to San Francisco. That was the goal. That was the goal.
Speaker 1: And it also had a bucket list, which is appropriate
Speaker 1: since it was a bucket. I have the bucket list
Speaker 1: in front of me. Uh. Well, the bucket list has
Speaker 1: a couple of check marks on it. Now. One check
Speaker 1: mark was, um uh, to do the wave of a
Speaker 1: sports game anywhere, it didn't matter where it was to
Speaker 1: do that. Uh. The other one was to see the
Speaker 1: lights in Times Square, of course in New York City.
Speaker 1: And there were others. There's other stuff along the way,
Speaker 1: and I'll just mention a few of these because there's
Speaker 1: probably again different things. In Grand Canyon has to be
Speaker 1: on there. Let's see Grand Canyon. Um Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I'll have to check out. Yes, it does. See the
Speaker 1: jaw dropping views of the Grand Canyon. That is one. Yes.
Speaker 1: In Arizona, um, posed with the Lincoln Statue in d
Speaker 1: C was another one. Tan at Myrtle beach Um experienced
Speaker 1: the magic of Walt Disney World in Florida. So it
Speaker 1: was going to need to actually go south along the
Speaker 1: Eastern Seaboard. I mean, for people who are not from
Speaker 1: the United States and aren't familiar with our geography, if
Speaker 1: you were going Boston to San Francisco, you would essentially
Speaker 1: be setting your sites west. Yeah, just do west, Just
Speaker 1: go yeah, just go west, and just keep on adjusting
Speaker 1: your your your journey in orders for you to get
Speaker 1: to California exactly. But with this list, it means that
Speaker 1: you would have need you first would need to go south,
Speaker 1: because you would have to go south from Boston well
Speaker 1: to get to New York City, but also to d
Speaker 1: C and to Florida. And then this goes all over
Speaker 1: the place, I mean all over the Midwest. So there
Speaker 1: are things to do in Illinois like explore the cloud
Speaker 1: Gate in Millennium park Um, stand under the Gateway Arch
Speaker 1: in Missouri, just all kinds of things like this. And
Speaker 1: again it's a it's a relatively long list and with
Speaker 1: many different states, many different activities. And checked off two
Speaker 1: items on that list. Yeah, and the reason that only
Speaker 1: two items were checked off is that Hitchbot met and
Speaker 1: untimely demise at the hands of a vandal maliciously murdered, Yes, decapitated.
Speaker 1: Can you just can you say murdered when it's a robot?
Speaker 1: What I mean it was? I mean disassembled? Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what Johnny five was scared about. No disassembled Johnny five. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I'm guessing disassembled is probably the best way of
Speaker 1: putting it. At some point, you figure there's gonna be
Speaker 1: another robot getting a delivery with a cardboard box, and
Speaker 1: it'll just be what's in the box? Uh, and they'll
Speaker 1: have the binary uh code for seven as the title
Speaker 1: of that. Very clever, very clever. All right, So this
Speaker 1: is a weird, weird ending. So, um, it is the
Speaker 1: night prior to this, so it's it's what the end
Speaker 1: of July, right, because I think this all went down
Speaker 1: on August first, as when we heard exactly, so July
Speaker 1: thirty one. Um, I think it was a Saturday night
Speaker 1: and Hitchbot was in Philadelphia and hanging out with a
Speaker 1: vlogger by the name of Jesse Wellens. And it is
Speaker 1: well documented what they did in their evening during their
Speaker 1: evening because you know, Wellens being a YouTube YouTube personality, Um,
Speaker 1: it took him on the town. You kind of did
Speaker 1: a lot of different things with him. There were other
Speaker 1: people involved. There's another guy um there with him. His
Speaker 1: name was ed bass Master. It was another YouTube personality
Speaker 1: and they had kind of a fun evening. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: whole the whole idea was that this is a I
Speaker 1: mean it was. It was elevating Hitchbot's profile and elevating
Speaker 1: the YouTuber's profile. This was this is a dream come
Speaker 1: true for a YouTube personality because it gives you the
Speaker 1: chance to interact with a meme while it's at while
Speaker 1: it's happening. You're not capitalizing it on afterwards. This is
Speaker 1: this is like a once in a lifetime type deal.
Speaker 1: It can it can garner you 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 at 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 if you wanted to. In fact,
Speaker 1: the early part of the trip we didn't talk about this,
Speaker 1: but it took a long time for it to leave
Speaker 1: the Boston area. People in Boston, we're taking it to
Speaker 1: different parks and different you know, they're taking out on
Speaker 1: boats and things and taking you know, selfies with it,
Speaker 1: and um, it took I think it was more than
Speaker 1: seven days for it to get out of the Boston area,
Speaker 1: which I think the team would have found wonderful because
Speaker 1: it was what was happening was the robot was gathering
Speaker 1: a series of rich experiences, and the people were gathering
Speaker 1: the experience of interacting with the robot, which was the
Speaker 1: purpose for this thing in the first place. So having
Speaker 1: it take a really long time to get off any
Speaker 1: area would not be considered a a an impediment on
Speaker 1: the behalf of the people running the project. They I'm
Speaker 1: sure loved it. Oh yeah, in no way is that
Speaker 1: a failure. That's a that's a wind as fact. So
Speaker 1: you know, here it is after this fun evening on
Speaker 1: the thirty feet and they placed it on the bench
Speaker 1: middle of the night. You know it's late at night
Speaker 1: of course dark. They placed it on a park bench,
Speaker 1: or not a park bench, but a bench on the
Speaker 1: city street there. And that's it. I mean, you see
Speaker 1: a cab driver arrive. Think uh. And and that's it.
Speaker 1: I mean at the end of the video interaction with
Speaker 1: with hitchpot at that point. And the next day we
Speaker 1: wake up to the news that Hitchbot has been murdered. Yes,
Speaker 1: its head had been removed from its torso and its
Speaker 1: arms ripped off. And I gotta ask you this when
Speaker 1: you saw the photograph of Hitchbot, because now this is
Speaker 1: a dramatic photograph, I mean it did it did look
Speaker 1: a lot like a true crime scene photo in that
Speaker 1: uh and that horrific as this maybe, I mean, Hitchbot's
Speaker 1: arms were pulled off and placed above its head and um,
Speaker 1: he was laying in a pile of leaves. It's headless
Speaker 1: at this point, I mean, they're they're real crime scene
Speaker 1: photos like that. Now understand this was starting. It was
Speaker 1: starting to feel like this is this is the robot
Speaker 1: equivalent of a serial killer a crime scene. So it
Speaker 1: was laid out in this light like the staged manner
Speaker 1: and uh and very very showy, I guess. And there
Speaker 1: were actually websites or you know, logs that would say,
Speaker 1: I don't really feel comfortable showing you this image, which
Speaker 1: is weird because here it's just a bucket with a
Speaker 1: 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 of it that way. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you
Speaker 1: could gather the stuff up at Walmart and put it
Speaker 1: on the floor and not think twice about it. But
Speaker 1: now that we know that this is this uh this
Speaker 1: this thing that they've created that has a name. Uh,
Speaker 1: now it takes on a different twist, doesn't it take?
Speaker 1: It 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 to this uh secret surveillance
Speaker 1: video that was taken it in from a nearby store
Speaker 1: that shows what happened. And someone wanders up in a
Speaker 1: football jersey and just kicks the living heck out of
Speaker 1: this thing and destroys it. But it's it's shown just
Speaker 1: on screen. We don't actually see the person kicking and
Speaker 1: destroying this thing. We see him kicking in this destroying
Speaker 1: the area of the bench that that that Hitchbot was
Speaker 1: known to be last right, and then later uh, everyone
Speaker 1: was reporting that this video was essentially itself was staged. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a fake video because you can go to that
Speaker 1: scene and look exactly where it was taken from the
Speaker 1: same perspective. There's no camera there. Yeah, so it's a fake.
Speaker 1: And so what's going on here? Because they never have
Speaker 1: found the head of Hitchbot. I mean they never found
Speaker 1: the I guess the CPU, the the thing that would
Speaker 1: tell them PC. Yeah, that would tell them what is
Speaker 1: what is happening? Like 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, right, or if or if it just happened
Speaker 1: to default within that time frame between when the photos
Speaker 1: are taken and didn't capture anything right, and it's just
Speaker 1: like everybody else, they don't know anything. It's possible either way, uh,
Speaker 1: the you know, of course there was a huge reaction
Speaker 1: to this both ways. Yeah. Yeah, there were people who
Speaker 1: were saying, this is awful, this is the worst. You know,
Speaker 1: it really reflects poorly on the United States that a
Speaker 1: robot that was capable of safely traveling from one coast
Speaker 1: of Canada to the other, and also in Germany and
Speaker 1: also in the Netherlands gets barely into its journey here
Speaker 1: in the United States before it's destroyed. That seven days. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that was a telling um condemnation, if you will,
Speaker 1: of the United States. In general and Philadelphia in particular.
Speaker 1: You can think of all the different comments that were
Speaker 1: immediately happening afterwards. A lot of people would say like, well,
Speaker 1: this happens to real hitchhikers as well, it happens to
Speaker 1: people well, and then there were a ton of comments
Speaker 1: that said, well, of course this happened in Philadelphia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's that. And there's another group of people that would
Speaker 1: just respond with something like a big deal. It was
Speaker 1: a bucket of bolts anyway, 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 over.
Speaker 1: I would argue that the team probably says, no, it's
Speaker 1: 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 data 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 cried, they're they're watching this thing and
Speaker 1: they're thinking, they're almost making it into like like it's
Speaker 1: like you're watching a dog or something like that. That's
Speaker 1: that's dying. That thing right there is dying and I'm
Speaker 1: watching it happen, and they're not understanding that. It's like, um, now,
Speaker 1: I know it's way more complexness, but it's not like,
Speaker 1: well it's time to get a new toaster, right, you know,
Speaker 1: It's not like a machine that you don't really have
Speaker 1: any kind of personal attachment to attachment. Like if my
Speaker 1: microwave were to malfunction, I think a lot of pain
Speaker 1: in the butt. I have to go and get a
Speaker 1: new one. If you're not gonna cry. No. But and
Speaker 1: again that that goes right back into that idea of
Speaker 1: how do robots and humans interact? And and we do
Speaker 1: need to think about this because if we enter into
Speaker 1: a world where we start treating these relationships is really casual.
Speaker 1: When stuff happens and people go through an actual grieving experience,
Speaker 1: we won't be ready for it. But if we know
Speaker 1: ahead of time, we can say, all right, you know
Speaker 1: what we we know this about ourselves. This is something
Speaker 1: that is innately human, at least for many people. 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, whatever elicits from the humans. That's
Speaker 1: what you're looking for, Yeah, and so or at least
Speaker 1: that you account for it, even if that's not the
Speaker 1: purpose of whatever it is you're making. You at least
Speaker 1: account for the fact that it exists. Scott and I
Speaker 1: will be right back with more about the sad tale
Speaker 1: of Hitchbot after this. In the fallout of all of this,
Speaker 1: we've seen not just the condemnation of an act of
Speaker 1: violence against what seemed to be an innocent creature that
Speaker 1: love adventure and meeting people, or as Smith had called it,
Speaker 1: a story collecting and story generating machine, like that was
Speaker 1: its purpose. We've also seen people come together to say,
Speaker 1: we can't let this be the end of the story.
Speaker 1: Um we there are a couple of different groups in
Speaker 1: Philadelphia that had said, let us build a robot two
Speaker 1: continue on in the spirit of Hitchbot, because I can't
Speaker 1: stand for hitchbot story to have ended in the city
Speaker 1: that I call home. Let's let's let's have a chance
Speaker 1: to make this right. Yeah, and we're gonna do it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there are the tech community in Philadelphia has responded
Speaker 1: with this and actually received some more or less tentative
Speaker 1: thumbs up from some of the members of the hitch
Speaker 1: Bot team to give this a go. And so there's
Speaker 1: a group um at that gathered at the Hactory. The Hactory,
Speaker 1: it's like a factory factory in West Philadelphia. Um, this
Speaker 1: was this is very recent and when this happened. Uh,
Speaker 1: And they have come up with an idea that they're
Speaker 1: calling the Philly love Bot, which I don't like the
Speaker 1: sound of that. Yeah, an odd choice for a name. Wait,
Speaker 1: but in the brotherly love. Okay. I don't want to
Speaker 1: I don't wanna take this in the wrong direction or anything.
Speaker 1: But we're not talking about a sex spot. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: a sexpot. I didn't want to just come right out
Speaker 1: and say it, but it seems like I've heard of
Speaker 1: products like this. Yeah no, not not that kind of love.
Speaker 1: But this is more of a love for all mankind
Speaker 1: and robots kind of what kind of bought podcast. If
Speaker 1: I wandered into Yeah, no, I'm not going to do
Speaker 1: another bait and switch on your Scott. I already promised
Speaker 1: you I wasn't gonna do that. Not doing it this time, honest.
Speaker 1: So they said that. Um, the idea they have is
Speaker 1: they would build a robot that was designed to be
Speaker 1: passed from one person to another, so it's not designed
Speaker 1: to hitchhike from one location to another location. There's no
Speaker 1: location requirement, at least in their initial approach. Instead, what
Speaker 1: they want is to design a robot that when you,
Speaker 1: when you take possession of it, when someone gives it
Speaker 1: to you, you are tasked with performing a good deed
Speaker 1: however you define it, and it gets documented by the
Speaker 1: robot itself. The robot you take along with you to
Speaker 1: do whatever this good deed maybe Christian idea, and then
Speaker 1: you pass it on. It's like a pay it forward.
Speaker 1: You pass the robot onto someone else, and it is
Speaker 1: their duty now to go out and do a good deed.
Speaker 1: And the idea to kind of a tone for the
Speaker 1: horrible murder of Hitchbot by promoting good deeds, and the
Speaker 1: robot is the kind of the almost like a totem
Speaker 1: for that. I was gonna say, I like this idea,
Speaker 1: But you could do the same thing with a with
Speaker 1: a carved stick. You could hand a carved stick to somebody.
Speaker 1: Now that you're in possession of the stick, it's your
Speaker 1: duty to do a good deed and pass the stick
Speaker 1: onto somebody else. It doesn't have to be, uh, something
Speaker 1: that collects and gathers the information. But I guess that
Speaker 1: keeps everybody kind of this, doesn't it? Well? Yeah? And
Speaker 1: I think also you know you I They also are
Speaker 1: planning on having the robot, which I am going to
Speaker 1: guess is going to be another really another computer, or
Speaker 1: not so much a robot. They're going to have it
Speaker 1: capable of interacting with you, just as the hitchbot could. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, there will still be that robot human
Speaker 1: interaction element that will play a part in this experiment,
Speaker 1: but the nature of the the overall experiment, the the
Speaker 1: perceived purpose will be different. Now. Isn't this funny? Because
Speaker 1: I wonder what some people are going to consider a
Speaker 1: good deed too, because there might be some comical examples
Speaker 1: of what people consider to be their good deed for humanity,
Speaker 1: like one I I yeah, I I imagine we would
Speaker 1: see everything from someone saying, all right, I'm gonna take
Speaker 1: this robot with me while me and my company while
Speaker 1: we go out and we clean up a neighborhood. That
Speaker 1: could be one, or it could be I'm going to
Speaker 1: set this robot here on the corner so it can
Speaker 1: watch me as I stopped traffic, so this mama duck
Speaker 1: and her baby ducks can get across the street. It's
Speaker 1: could be anything, yeah, like oh man, you almost spilled
Speaker 1: your beer, but I I saved you. I'm passing this
Speaker 1: thing on 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, because 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 always straight across. But the idea was to
Speaker 1: see what happens along the way. It's like the journey
Speaker 1: is better than the destination exactly. Yeah, And that it's
Speaker 1: those experiences that were important and that documenting culture. And
Speaker 1: we're talking about an emerging culture now, not just tradition,
Speaker 1: not just the embedded culture that's been around for generations.
Speaker 1: We're talking about an emerging culture of technolog ology and
Speaker 1: our daily lives intermingling on a level that has been
Speaker 1: it's unprecedented. We've never seen it like that, and it
Speaker 1: grows every day, so fascinating, really a fascinating experiment. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't call it a failure at all. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: sad that the Hitchbot didn't get further along in its
Speaker 1: journey so that more people could experience it and that
Speaker 1: we could have more stories. But it's all right, because
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: some 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 reason, 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 human 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. So
Speaker 1: this has really been fascinating and I can't wait to
Speaker 1: see what the next phase will bring to us. Can
Speaker 1: I ask you one question before we leave here? And
Speaker 1: I we had discussed this, but only briefly and we
Speaker 1: didn't really get into much detail. But um, had you
Speaker 1: not known about hitchpot right, had you never heard of
Speaker 1: this whole thing exactly? You passed it on the on
Speaker 1: the city streets driving, would you stop to pick it up?
Speaker 1: None a chance at all that I would stop because
Speaker 1: and you made me think about this because I was
Speaker 1: coming to it from the perspective of knowing about Hitchbot.
Speaker 1: If I saw hitch Bot, I'd think, holy wrap, there's
Speaker 1: the hitchhiking robot. We've got to take part in this.
Speaker 1: This is something special. And I feel the exact same way.
Speaker 1: But not knowing about Hitchbot, not knowing about it, and
Speaker 1: seeing a bucket that has electronics attached to it, even
Speaker 1: with the happy face, maybe particularly with the happy face,
Speaker 1: I might think, oh, what this is like a suspicious
Speaker 1: device of something. I thought, I said, it looks at
Speaker 1: an awful lot like an I E. D. Yeah, I thought,
Speaker 1: it's not too far off in the description. I know
Speaker 1: that they're a little more um, I guess camouflaged in
Speaker 1: the way that they typically do those things. But this
Speaker 1: just seems to me like not a good idea to
Speaker 1: pick something up, like, you know, something like this up
Speaker 1: on the street and you know, strap it in the
Speaker 1: car next to your kids. Yeah, not really, but I mean,
Speaker 1: knowing what it is, yeah, of course you'd want to
Speaker 1: do that. You'd want to you know, it'd be a
Speaker 1: great experience for you and your family, you know, to
Speaker 1: to do something with us, even if you drive it
Speaker 1: a mile or five miles or whatever, just take a
Speaker 1: quick photograph with it and say you were part of
Speaker 1: that journey. That's kind of cool. It's actually kind of
Speaker 1: interesting to me that Hitchbot spent seven days in Boston
Speaker 1: because Boston is also where we had the Aquitine Hunger
Speaker 1: Force Moon Andite bomb scare. It was in two thousand
Speaker 1: seven and it was in Boston. Was in Boston, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's with the Neon or not. I'm sorry. L E. D. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um well yeah, yeah, you can tell him what it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the l E ED They there were these two
Speaker 1: characters from Aquitine Hunger Force, these two Moonites from the Moon.
Speaker 1: They look like uh like yeah eight that characters from
Speaker 1: a really crappy video game that they're specifically made to
Speaker 1: look like that they're two dimensional. They're they When they
Speaker 1: turn sideways, you don't see him anymore because they're gone.
Speaker 1: And they're hilarious. They are hilarious. They are incredibly inappropriate,
Speaker 1: as is everything on Aquitine Hunger Force, but they are hilarious.
Speaker 1: And there was a publicity stunt where, uh, these l
Speaker 1: e ed signs of the two characters were put up
Speaker 1: in very locations and in Boston it caused a bomb scare.
Speaker 1: People thought that maybe it was the indication of an
Speaker 1: explosive device nearby, and so they were dismantled, and it
Speaker 1: very quickly became kind of a joke slash a discussion
Speaker 1: about you have to be very careful in the way
Speaker 1: you present these kind of guerrilla marketing attempts because in
Speaker 1: a in a post nine eleven world, they can be misinterpreted.
Speaker 1: It was post nine eleven and pre marathon bombing too, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's kind of in between. But um, they were
Speaker 1: on high alert there for a while about these signs,
Speaker 1: and then you know, sheepishly Cartoon Network had to say, oh,
Speaker 1: that was us, yeah, and I hear's what happened but
Speaker 1: in fact they were a little reluctant to say that
Speaker 1: was us. Well, but you know, then again bad press
Speaker 1: is still pressed. That's true. So I'm actually amazed that
Speaker 1: the that hitchbot didn't meet with any hitches in Boston
Speaker 1: based on that um and the and as you when
Speaker 1: you asked that question, you gave the qualifier, Hey, you've
Speaker 1: never heard of hitchbot and you see this thing on
Speaker 1: the side of the road. I definitely would have wondered
Speaker 1: what the heck it was, and I probably would have
Speaker 1: thought I might not want to get too close to
Speaker 1: that just in case. Yeah, sure, And imagine if you were, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, somewhere in Canada, you know where it's it's
Speaker 1: wide open farmland, and uh, you know, there's it's it's
Speaker 1: a mile between houses, and this thing is propped up
Speaker 1: on its it's its legs and its tripods seat there
Speaker 1: out in the middle of nowhere. I don't think I'd stopped.
Speaker 1: And in that case, I probably would stop, only because
Speaker 1: I would think, who the heck would set up something
Speaker 1: sinister in the middle of nowhere where you are not
Speaker 1: likely to affect much of anything at all, And that's
Speaker 1: how they get you. Whereas I would be more concerned
Speaker 1: about the the city location where the the opportunity is higher.
Speaker 1: Ye yep, I just see it as like, and that
Speaker 1: was the last thing that he thought. Well, I already
Speaker 1: told you that I was worried that my obituary from
Speaker 1: yesterday was going to say choked to death on twizzlers.
Speaker 1: So it's actually much worse. Yeah, no, especially since I
Speaker 1: hate twizzlers all right. Well, at any rate, this was
Speaker 1: really a lot of fun to talk about, and it
Speaker 1: was fun to kind of, you know, think about the
Speaker 1: weird adventures, which are all, like I said, documented. You
Speaker 1: can go to the hitchbot website and read up on
Speaker 1: the different days and events and things that it encountered
Speaker 1: in the people it met. So many successful journeys and
Speaker 1: so many events and things that had happened that happened,
Speaker 1: and and it posted about all that stuff, and all
Speaker 1: his interactions are recorded in some way, which is great,
Speaker 1: so you can actually go back and relive those journeys.
Speaker 1: And I do hope that we see some further experiments
Speaker 1: that that are in the same spirit, whether or not
Speaker 1: it's another hitchhiking thing or it's like the Philly love butt,
Speaker 1: or I know, it's like it's like I'm ten years old.
Speaker 1: I can't you can't say that, and I still giggle
Speaker 1: every time. But you know, I see what you mean.
Speaker 1: I I anticipate a bunch of copycat hitchpots popping up.
Speaker 1: Um here's another little thing that we didn't get to
Speaker 1: really talk about this, but I think the very next
Speaker 1: thing we're going to see out of this unfortunately, and
Speaker 1: this is just my gut feeling. You said, somebody probably
Speaker 1: scrapped the head, you know, the control unit. I have
Speaker 1: a feeling we're going to see a photograph of that
Speaker 1: show up somewhere that's going to be sent to the
Speaker 1: creators of the of a hitch pot, which to the
Speaker 1: creators probably would just be yet another data point. I 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 at least
Speaker 1: I would guess this is armchair psychology. But I would
Speaker 1: imagine that they would think of it as like a joke.
Speaker 1: That you know, I'm treating this as if it were
Speaker 1: a real person. Meanwhile, there are other people who think
Speaker 1: that's sick because they do think of hitch Pot as
Speaker 1: at least some in some way similar to a person.
Speaker 1: And this is again here I read a lot of
Speaker 1: true crime, so it's not that I'm just thinking about
Speaker 1: this all the time. I mean, I'm just saying around
Speaker 1: the one year anniversary, just pay attention to what's going
Speaker 1: on the news. It might happen, might not happen. I
Speaker 1: don't have any inside info or anything like that. I
Speaker 1: could just as easily be that someone saw it and thought,
Speaker 1: oh I want a tablet. PC could be, and it
Speaker 1: could It could have ended up in a dumpster half
Speaker 1: 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. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed that classic episode of tech stuff, The
Speaker 1: Sad Tale of Hitchmot This is why we cannot have
Speaker 1: nice things. If you'd like to get in touch with me,
Speaker 1: let me know what you would like me to talk about.
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