Also isn't white just the natural plastic coloring before any dye?
Yeah, most plastics are either transparent or milky white-ish without colourings or additives.
So you're saying that plastic itself is racist.
It's like, it's totes not bad enough that plastics are colonial icing our planet and converting it into a microplastics sanctuary to rid all life from the planet.
But they also have to wear white... smh
Bright white, no.
ABS
Yup. It’s like giving you a silver car free from primer, paint and clear coat. It would save the manufacturer oodles of cash.
And I’d also like to remind people that news’s primary focus is not to report facts, but generate sales. The way they do that is spinning events in any way shape or form. Even going so far as not covering certain topics because it may hurt their bottom line.
The worst thing they did was convince people they were unbiased and trustworthy.
Good ol' CNN post-purchase. Chasing racism and sensationalism over actual news...
White is an excellent color for a complicated robot. Marks aren't hidden. It's not taking light away when looking in at hardware, it doesn't shade surroundings as much, and it matches every other damn piece of scientific equipment they throw in to labs, too.
Color neutral and bright has utility purpose. CNN is too stupid and dishonest to know that.
Plus if it's outside, there are fewer heat issues.
And if things go wrong, it can't lurk in the shadows.
Turns out lighter colors are perceived as cleaner and friendlier.
Or maybe hospitals are racist too? Or we need more hospitals with black walls and floors.
We could call them gothpitals.
Love it, I'm in
Enter into the void of the black MRI machine
They should paint them red and tile them like all leisure centers used to be in the '80s.
They should paint them with blood
Imma be honest, that hospital sounds metal as fuck. I'm down.
Yo regular hospitals are freaky enough at night, please. I don't think a funeral color scheme would help
It certanly would help in case you suddenly will need funreal in hospital.
Big Custodian has lobbied hard to keep hospitals using them. Black would hide all flavors of bodily fluids, so they wouldn't need to be cleaned as often. Instead we have to use pastel greens and blues that show every drop of blood and the tiniest smears of poo. It's disgusting.
Outrage addiction is so real.
The irony is that you are the one who is outraged. Like I'm not trying to sass or insult you, but this is literally the conclusion they want you to have.
Of course this isn't a real problem, its basically a hate-click troll. But those clicks still equal profit so why not publish it, news is a profit centered business like anything else, not an objective view on "the truth".
The answer is albedo, white is easier to find of you lose it especially in space.
also reflects more light/heat, reducing the need for radiators to manage heat. This is why most spacecraft are white.
I'm so fucking sick of everything being politicized. Now we're doing it with fucking plastic....
Plastic is very political.
Robots in actual use are painted safety yellow or orange, because they are a safety hazard. Thus we put up warnings, fences and light gates. Plus shutoff buttons everywhere and a multi step process to turn them on.
Tesla's KUKA arms were red when I worked there. But that's probably because Elon hates yellow.
Each brand has their own colour they tend to use (unless a customer like Tesla orders something custom). Kuka usually is orange, Fanuc is yellow, ABB white, Yaskawa blue, etc.
IMO we need to stop humanizing robots. There is no reason for a robot to be human in form. Form should match function. Furthermore, a humanoid robots elicit feelings from people that are not helpful or healthy. There are people who might
adviseabuse a robot because it isn't an actual person, it doesn't mean that their abuse is less mentally ill. They should be viewed as a machine and treated as such, no better than a car.Humans are bipedal for a reason, it’s one of the most versatile and efficient forms of mobility. Plus the world is designed for humans, making an humanoid robot allows them to interact with things made for humans more easily.
And humans can grow an attachment to and anthropomorphize plenty of non-humanoid objects. So I think it’s fine that it’s human shaped.
You ever play QWOP?
I disagree. Robots could still be designed to work and fit in human spaces but be much more versatile with more limbs. Like they could have 4 legs that are the same size as 2 human legs (think 2 human legs split right down the center). Robots don't need muscle mass in order to carry their weight. You can fit way more in a smaller space with pneumatics. You could have arms that split apart into more arms when needed. Why only 5 fingers per hand? Why only 1 thumb per hand? Why only eyes/cameras on the head? They should have eyes/cameras everywhere. Every place you can put them. Bipedal is good enough for us because it's what we have. When you get to design something from the ground up, make it harder, better, faster, stronger.
I mean the world is usually (and should be) designed for people in wheelchairs, too. The only thing that comes to mind that humans frequently interface with, which benefits from human bipedalism, is stairs. Stairs aren't something that's impossible to design around with a wheeled vehicle, either, and I don't think the efficiency tradeoff is one that turns out in favor of legs, at least for robots.
The only thing I can really conceive of as being a use case for a humanoid robot is if you decided to deploy it in a totally unbuilt environment with little infrastructure, which is pretty counterintuitive considering the energy density of current battery technology. I think that would probably only work as an idea if you had like, a nuclear battery, for a human scale robot, and we have tank treads for everything else. I think maybe the prevalence of legs in robotics either stems from the fact that people think it's cool, which is important for funding, it stems from some amount of funding coming from military or pseudo-military applications like "disaster relief" where an ability to operate in diverse environments is seen as a plus, and it stems from people banking on denser and denser battery technology and maybe lighter weights material science.
I think it also stems from a kind of all-encompassing ideal to create a totally self-sufficient worker-slave that is both unconscious but is also totally adaptable to the environment and can operate with minimal inputs, compared to a person. There's like, some conception that you can make a robot which can act in an environment in the same basic way as a person, but then you also can't make any robots that are designed for any specialized tasks, and which might do those specialized tasks in a much, much more efficient way than a humanoid robot would be able to do them. Also somehow this ability to do tasks similar to how a person might do them would really be like, something that you have to confine to a human sized body, rather than just using it to sort of further automate the managerial class. There's some idea that this is more efficient to scale, rather than being more efficient at scale, or that somehow once you make a humanoid robot you will have cracked the code somehow, and everything will just be post-scarcity, because you can make the robots mine the lithium to make more robots.
I don't think I have to tell you that all of these are kind of naive, as viewpoints, or, are intrinsically viewpoints that kind of discount the amount of interpretive labor that has to be performed by people in order for the system to work, the variety of said labor as it exists, or the amount of effort involved that you would really have to do in order to automate that away. I think, to put it more bluntly, if you tasked a robot with automating a kind of, big, general batch of tasks like humans might perform, it would probably make a specialized set of robots which can complete all the tasks as suited to the task each robot has to do, rather than creating a big general human shaped robot to do them all.
So I think it’s fine that it’s human shaped.
yeh, looks way better than those four legged things
Sounds easier to make a human shaped robot than to make something else than can climb stairs as well as do everything else needed efficiently.
Maybe a different shape would be fine if they never needed to climb stairs or go up and down curbs, like rolling around everywhere, which we already see in some restaurants with the little programmable serving robots.
I can think of a very good reason to have human-shaped robots: sex robots. That's pretty much the only shape I'd be interested in.
We designed our world around ourselves
It is only logical the human shape is the most efficient and versatile design that fits it
It is only logical the human shape is the most efficient and versatile design that fits it
Don't know about that - cats seem to clamber around this neighborhood far more efficiently than I ever could.
Ugh... can we just fucking stop already?
We need the semi transparent colorful plastics robots.
I'm totally into the idea of a robot covered in N64 funtastic grape.
I'm thinking of my special edition purple glittery Game Boy.
Letting people see all the crappy soldering and cable bridges does not please the shareholders.
Scandalous!
Ken Bone? THAT Ken Bone? Ew
Had to scroll way too far down for someone to point that out, lol.
actually, if we're painting them black, isn't that just blackface now?
AI taking Republican jobs.
It's not that people want to be upset, but that "news" sites get profit from clicks and attention. It's not that anyone cares about this, but saying people care about it gets hate views.
I mean, here you are talking about it...
Seems fine to point and laugh from afar, it's not like they'll get any traffic here other than from OP. Besides TIL there actually are reasons for the white plastic look, so discussion is mildly useful?
Fuck it. All androids are now required to be highlighter yellow. That'll give em something to argue about.
So you’re comparing robots to Asians because they work a lot in school? That’s super racist.
No, we need blue robots like Smurfs. People won’t complain.
Blue like the mean kids on the Proud Family? So now they are representing mean black people? /s
Blue robots? "Owning a blue robot might be a sign of gay slavery".
"Owning a yellow robot might be a sign of chinese slavery"
Anyone remember the movie Ice Pirates? There’s a whole scene in there about the color of the robot.
Only you, RedLetterMedia, and everyone who watched that episode.
I saw it in the theater as a kid. Love that crazy movie.
"Why did you make it black?"
"Cause I wanted it to be perfect."
Robots are white for the same reason Apple computers are white: to chase that 2001 A Space Odyssey aesthetic that's become shorthand for "futuristic."
The Space Odyssey is racist too??
(Actually I haven't seen it, but a movie from 1968, wouldn't surprise me, if it wasn't all that PC)
It doesn't even really involve people (there's 1 guy and an AI).
But HAL was totally racist against humans.
You haven't seen it?
Wow.
But no, doesn't involve that.
Color: exists Newspapers: Does this color imply.. racism??
Sure, there is likely some racism involved, but it also has absolutely nothing to do with white being the cheapest type of ABS and PLA plastics. Greed trumps racism. And that was the most unintentionally descriptive sentence I have ever said about MAGA-ism.
but if you used recycled plastics it would probably be brown, or grey
From what I heard about on offhand comment white is used for more sleek-ish shapes and make things seem while black can make things look more intimidating and smaller. I’m pretty sure the size thing is used mostly in interior design
Don’t trust me on this citation needed for this whole comment
This is a common design principle. White seems bigger and inviting, black seems smaller and not as inviting. It's just how light works, it's not about skin.
Yeah I wasn’t talking about white and black in terms of paint, not the skin color white and black
But thanks for confirming my info that I had no idea if it was true
I've been told black plastic doesnt get recycled at the recycling plants because the sorting system doesn't work on black plastic.
That sorting system is clearly racist.
it was because light doesn't pass through so light is racist. the sorting system was just raised that way, maybe it can mend its ways...
Plastic that’s got a lot of color (especially black) is very, very hard to recycle. Getting the color out so you can make like-new, colorless plastic makes the economics pretty much impossible.
Should recycled plastic that isn’t colorless be accepted? Yep. But basically every manufacturer that uses recycled plastic only accepts colorless stuff. Even if they’re going to turn around and dump a bunch of pigment and dye into it! (Or especially if they’re going to do that. They have specific color targets.)
So, for now, if you buy something that’s made from recycled plastic but isn’t clear and colorless, that plastic is now outside of the recycle-able ecosystem. It’s a bummer.
But there are ways to get around that coming online. One is to turn the plastic polymers back into monomers (the building block molecules). It’s sometimes easier to separate out the pigments and dyes once you have a chemical soup of monomers instead of a block of plastic. Then you take the purified monomers and repolymerize them. Bam, you have recycled plastic that’s nearly indistinguishable from new.
I worked on a chemical recycling / depolymerization project for a couple of years. That tech is currently being scaled up into a big plant that’ll actually churn out like-new plastic from really crappy input material. Pretty exciting stuff. (As long as the business and engineering guys running the project now don’t ruin it.)
that sounds really cool actually. I hope the project is successfull because we have no shortage of lousy plastic.
Well Tesla's new robot is black so? I don't know what to think.
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