The Sad Tale of HitchBot

to operate. That's like one of those crazy firework rules, like where you can buy them, but you're not allowed to light them. Right Well, you could still right around in them, you just wouldn't be the one behind the wheel. What a horrible future we're talking about. And you know, I thought, since since that discussion went so well, let's talk about with cars and robots a little bit more. But for once, we're not talking about autonomous cars. Yeah, finally,

so let me paint you a word picture Scott. On July two thousand fourteen, Hitchhiker began a historic journey from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to get to Victoria, British Columbia. On the other side of Canada. We're talking crossing the entire width of Canada. And if you were to do that on the most efficient route possible, if you got to choose the route, that would be at minimum around three thousand, six hundred forty four miles or five thousand, eight hundred

sixty four kilometers. However, hitchhikers rarely have the ability to call exactly what route needs to be taken. They are at the mercy of the drivers that pick them up. Sure, I'm just I'm headed west exactly, take me as far as you're going. And not that I condone hitchhiking or anything like that. That's kind of dangerous. It can and we will definitely get into some danger territory. Part of this conversation, well, the full trip took closer to ten

thousand kilometers or about sixty two hundred miles. Uh. And here's the weird part. The hitchhiker was a robot. Ah, that is weird. Yeah, not a person. I've never picked up a hitchhiker. In fact, for a long time, I had never even seen one. Uh saw a lot in Hawaii. Surfer culture is still going strong. Yeah, there's certain parts of the United States that you can expect to see more hitchhikers than than other parts. And uh in Hawaii,

I guess would be one of those places. I've been there too, and I know exactly what we're talking about. I think I've seen more hitchhikers in Hawaii standing at bus stops attempting to hit your ride, just hoping to catch a ride before that bus shows up. You know, it's like one or the other. Eventually that bust will come. But if in the meantime, if I can just get a free ride down the road, That's what I'll do.

I've just seen lots and lots of surfers trying to trying to get to the beach, trying to catch that next wave. That's right, man, you can't the waves wait for no one. And so we're talking about Hitchbot, which a lot of you have probably heard about. Hitchbot made the news first made the news in two thousand and fourteen during this historic attempt to get a robot to hitchhike across all of Canada successful. It was successful, so spoiler alert there, and then went on to do this

again in Germany. It went all over Germany and it also took a little vacation in the Netherlands, and then finally there was an attempt for this robot to hitchhike it's way across the United States, which was cut short. Just like the robot. This all sounds so nice. What could possibly go wrong? So you might be wondering, I've heard about this, what actually is going on? The first thing I want to say is, while we're talking about a hitchhiking robot, honestly, if I were to describe this,

I would not have used the word robot. Yeah, it's they're using the term very loosely. I think here. I think it's because the form factor makes it looks sort of like a robot. Uh. And it definitely had the benefit of having like a light display that that made a very simple smiley face, so you had kind of a you know, a head that you could identify. But really, we're really talking about a hitchhiking computer. It's just a hitchhiking computer that was in a more or less static

robot body. It's simple, but they found a way to anthropomorphosize this thing to the point where people look at it and said, oh, that's kind of cute. Yeah, because it has a torso. It's got arms and legs, and arms and legs don't move the torso static torsos a bucket um literally and literally a bucket. It does have a cellar panels that are arranged on the outside of the bucket, so that's one of the ways that the

robot gets electricity. The other is that it will ask people to plug it into the a lighter socket on a in a car. Yeah, it's only about three ft tall, so it's very small. Waterproof, which is a kind of surprise. It's waterproof, but it is well and also, I mean it wears waterproof boots. Every single article, every article without fail, talks about the fact that it wears Wellies. Wellington's the brand name boot. Yeah, okay, like a like a rubber boot.

It's a named after the Duke of Wellington. Well It's arms are what pool noodles, So you know, it's not it's not like they went to two great lengths to try to make this thing look human or anything like that. But it does have arms and legs. It does have a face as you mentioned, has um a almost looks like a tupperware container on the top looks like a hat.

A beret or something like that. UM that's designed to to actually protect the the electronics, the tablet computer that is running the software that the robot so used likely part of the waterproofing overall, I guess, and UM it's GPS equipped. The thing weighs about twenty five pounds total,

so it's not that heavy. Really has its own built in seat that it's like a car seat almost that well, it is a car seat from a kid's car seat that you can then put in your car and buckle in so that secure when it's in there, it's not gonna fly around the vehicle loose, you know, it's something were to happen, right And and it's legs are not powered,

they are statics. So the way that you would set this up when you are done carrying it as far as you want to carry it is the seat also has essentially a lever that can fold down into a tripod like position, so the two legs act as two

of the legs of the tripod. This lever access the third and if you were to pick it up, you could fold that arm back up against the seat, so that would allow you to put it into your vehicle and secure the car seat, and as if you were in an area that you wanted to set it up on the side of the road that was you know, like a field or something where there's nowhere for it to sit, like on a bench or maybe on a wall or something right the right and uh, you know,

like I said, it was running on essentially a tablet PC that if you looked at all the equipment according to the website, Uh, it cost about a thousand dollars, maybe a little less. And that was a calculated decision. They wanted that. They, being the team behind this, and I'll talk about them in a second, wanted the robot to be inexpensive enough where it would not be an obvious target for someone to just steal the components out of it. They wanted it to be uh, accessible, They

wanted it to be cute. They wanted it to be something that people would want to interact with and to have enough of an ability to have interactions, including holding a conversation sort of ye kind of yeah, we're being real generous with the term conversation. That's one thing that you and I talked about off air is that every conversation we've ever seen with this, you know that between a human and hitchpot. It was awkward to say the least.

I mean, it was it kind of it kind of picked up on what what the even was saying, but not entirely didn't quite get the gist of the conversation, and it would respond in an awkward way. Yeah, it had. It had a microphone so it could pick up on what people were saying, and a speaker so it could

then return and communicate back. And a big problem with that was probably the the vast array of dialects that was dealing with, right, and just the fact that our spoken language is incredibly plastic and adaptive and there are so many different ways to say the same thing that it can be difficult for you know, It's like a non native speaker of any language, you might be taught how to say or ask for something a very specific way, and that specific way is still correct, it's not incorrect,

but it's just one way to say that, to express that thought. And in most languages there are lots of different ways to express the same thought, and you're familiar with one of them, so if anyone comes up to you and uses a different one, you could be completely confused. Even though you know, one way of saying it that you understand all these other ways don't. Same thing with computers.

If you train a computer using machine learning on what and phrases mean, that's great, the computer might be able to identify that. But if someone were to ask for the same sort of thing but word it slightly differently, that could be enough to throw a computer off, because these are subtle things that we humans can intuitively grasp, but computers lack intuition. And there's not only the word problem.

There's also the way that it's said. So the you know, the the regions, zones, like you know, here in the South, people talk different than they do in the Pacific, or the Pacific Northwest, or the or the Northeast or you know, the the Northeast talk faster than I can hear. So it's different. It's different, not only um, you know, just the different languages, like of course this thing had to learn German, had to learn, uh, you know, Dutch. I

guess I had no French to get through all of Canada. Sure, yeah, exactly right, and of course English, and you know, and not only that, but the different dialects along the way. Sure yeah, so lots of challenges here. But the whole goal was not The goal really, I don't think was to have a robot hitchhike from one end of Canada to another. That was sort of the the face of

this project. The actual goal was more of an artistic expression as well as an experiment in robot human interactions, because the thing could have been picked up right at the right at the start, right the very first day, and driven all the way across by one person, you know, on a long haul truck or something, and what would be the adventure and that what would be the fun.

The idea was that this relies on human interaction and human kindness to get this thing from one place to the next, kind of to take care of this thing and along the way have kind of a checklist of things that they wanted to do. Now I don't know if the Canadian trip had a checklist. I don't think it did. Uh. The USA trip did have a checklist,

which was was started um. But the Canadian trip um, you know, just for instance, you know, in twenty six days to get across um, you know, the entire nation there. But it did things like a tend to wedding, um, it was dancing in Saskatchewan. It it met some of the Canadians First Nations people, uh, some of the Aboriginal people um that were um, you know, native to Canada.

And it did all kinds of things. I mean, it went to you know, parks, it went to scenic locations, and all the time it was snapping photographs because this programmed to take a photo every twenty minutes, right, and it could tweet out that information. So it's interactions were uh doubled, and that it could interact in person to people who are around it and actually attempt to have a conversation and interject. In fact, I read one report of people who had picked up the robot and they said, yeah,

it was weird. There were three of us in the car plus the robot, and we would the three of us be talking, and the robot would interject and interrupt us and often say something that is completely not connected to any of the rest of the conversation. And I thought, I've written in cars with people like that, you know, just just someone just pipes up with a total non sequitor and you think, are are we in the car with a crazy person? What's that have to do with

the price of eggs? In China. Yeah, something along those lines, and so, uh, you know that that was definitely part of it. I think there was certainly an an element of let's see how humans treat robots and also let's see how we can design a robot that from the get go is meant to interact with humans. Because one of the things we're starting to see increasingly in technology is the robotic sphere and the human sphere colliding like there and and by design, we want robots in our lives.

People have named their room bas for example, they have given their room bas uh. You know, they've they've imprinted upon them this idea of a personality. Something happens to that room, but you know how sad you're going to be, Well, I'd be sad to be out you know two bucks. That's another thing that there's that side. But you know, if something happens to Fred, yeah, don't name your room bot, right. Yeah, But that's true, is a lot of people do name

these these robots. People get emotionally invested in these machines. And so there is this growing field of research of human robotic interactions. How can we one capitalize on this need for humans to have an emotional attachment to these these otherwise emotionless beings, these beings that lack of consciousness, lack emotions. How can we capitalize on that so that the interactions are are useful and meaningful in some way,

even if it's only meaningful for the human. If it's impossible for it to be meaningful for the robot, that's okay, if it's still meaningful for the human. Or how do we design robots that are specifically meant to not evoke that reaction, because it would be just you know, another

distraction from whatever the robot is supposed to do. Sure, or it maybe that whatever the robot is supposed to do is inherently dangerous and should not you know, you don't want to encourage human interaction if if a robot is meant to do something like dig into rubble, you don't want people to, you know, worry about the robot.

The whole reason the robots digging into rubble in the first place is likely to look for survivors in the in the fall out of a building collapse or something, or well just to prevent having to have a human do the same thing. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah, and that's really I mean, the way that a lot of robotics experts see robots really taking off, at least in the near future, is they will be used to do jobs that are either too dirty, dull, or dangerous for humans.

So jobs that are incredibly repetitive and don't require much thought, robots are perfect for that. Also, robots don't sustain like repetitive injuries. You know, you do have to continuously main tame them. You can't just expect them to work forever. But they don't get carbal tunnel syndrome for unless right,

and we we will get to that point eventually. And dangerous obviously, you don't want, you know, you would want to be able to use a robot in a dangerous situation so that you're not putting human life at risk, but with the goal of being able to use it again and again and again. Right. So, but those robots probably don't need to have a lot of human interactivity. They're designed to do something that they're replacing a human,

not interacting with a human. But at the same time, we are seeing this growing industry of robots that are designed to be around us in our daily lives, either as a telepresence style robot where the robot is standing in as a surrogate for an actual person, and you might have like an iPad or something like that as a head where someone can skype in. And this is always creepy whenever I see it done anywhere, but I

keep being told it's the way of the future. I have never actually interacted directly with one in an official capacity, but I've seen them at CS. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna make a reference to something that I have nothing I have no personal interaction with. I believe my wife was telling me about a movie recently called Her and it was a man who fell in love with the operating system and uh and the voice that that that that operating system had. Now I can see something like that.

Let's say you get a refrigerator, and refrigerators have screens on them. Now ours does hear it how stuff works, And it's got a screen but doesn't talk to us, But it does have a screen. You can interact, and there's a lot of different things you can do with that screen, including putting a wacky background image on it, as someone did when they put in the UM, the

symbol for the evil organization from loss Um. I could see if if it was talking to you every day and had a likable voice, something that you felt comfortable interacting with. Um that you know, I could see somebody saying why I'd be sad to get rid of that refrigerator in in five years? Well, especially if you would come home after a long day and the refrigerator says, Hi, would you like a frosty adult beverage? I mean, you know you're gonna have a bond with that machine immediately. Yeah.

So but there there's this whole discipline that's coming up, like how do we how do we define these interactions? How do we shape them? Uh? And a lot of it means you have to do study on both sides. You have to do a study on the robot side like what works and what doesn't, and you actually have to study human psychology how do humans respond to robots and at what point do humans end up treating robots as if they are alive, as if they're living creatures.

And for a while people were thinking, um, well, the robot's gonna need to look like something biological already, Like it's gonna have to be like a robot dog or a robot you know, android type person almost like like a crash test dummy where it looks like a human but you can tell it's not a real human. And it turns out that's not necessarily true, because as we've already said, people have been naming the room bus. People

get emotionally invested. It turns out that we are if it looks animate, if it appears to behave based upon its own decisions, whether it's true or not. If it if it looks like it's doing that, we start to

kind of in our minds give it these qualities. So a lot of this really was studying that, like this idea of the way people and machines are interacting and how that is becoming defined over time and what we might need to think about in that respect, and also just kind of a you know, is a happy story about how people find joy in uh, a silly I mean, really you get down to it, it's a silly robot,

not a bad robot. It's a silly robot. And and the the experience of discovery and sharing that with other people. That was a big part of this project too, and it was really successful for three out of the four big things that it did. The one that wasn't so successful and was the unit at States. So um really quickly, before we get into the US stuff, I was going to talk about some of the folks who designed and

came up with this idea. Uh. The two leads who first came up with the concept for Hitchbot, we're David Harris Smith and Franca Zeller. And I probably a mispronouncing Mrs Ellery heard Fraca Zella. It's a name that I am. I was not familiar with, totally new for me. And they're out of port Credit, Ontario. Yes, and uh. Smith is assistant professor at McMaster University in the Department of Communication Studies. Zeller is an assistant professor in the School

of Professional Communication at Ryerson University Communications professors. Now, this makes perfect sense because they're they're fishing for the way people interact with this. They want to find out exactly how people respond to this, how how in response to them. Uh, this interaction is really really interesting for these people in particular, I'm sure right. And Zella she got her PhD. Her thesis was on human robot interaction. Then, yeah, and they

were joined by a lot of other people. I've just got a couple of names I'll mention, but the team itself is quite large. You can actually read up on all of them on the website. It's funny because the way the website is written, it's written from Hitchbot's perspective. So hitch it's Hitchbot saying, oh, this is the person who helped me learn how to talk and it's very cute. This is the person that takes care of my electronics. Yes, on a daily basis. I think they're about fourteen or

fifteen people on that team. It's big. It's a big team. Is a large team, not just the two two leads here, right, So you've got people like a colin or a gadget who has a develop ro hitchbot, and he's also a McMaster University student. He helped design and test hitchbot to make sure it would be able to withstand the various environments that it would encounter. Keep in mind, this was summer in Canada, so it wasn't going to have to deal with a Canadian winter. Beautiful Canadian summer. Yeah, it's

a little bit different from the Atlanta summers. Slightly slightly less warm and humid, about sixty degrees cooler fahrenheit that is um not Celsius. That would be pretty incredible. Uh. So then you had Davin Bigelow, who was an undergraduate student at McMaster who worked on the conversational skills of this robot. Karen Reveal birth Fish, who was another person who worked on Hitchbot's language skills. Dominic kal Kinn whose undergraduate student at McMaster whose job was to monitor Hitchbot's

status and make sure the robot was okay. So again, the robot was fitted with GPS and three G capability to essentially report back home saying here's where I'm at, being given time in every twenty minutes, he's getting a photograph sent from this robot to him to kind of update status where he is right now. Yeah, and then uh there was the big brother robot to Hitchbot, culture Bot k U L t U R. But this was this was a robot that preceded Hitchbot. This was a

different human robot interaction experiment. Culture bots job was to attend artistic exhibitions, take images of what was going on, tweet them, and critique them. It was a robotic art critic interesting anyway, so it would actually do the critique on the fly They're like right there at the event. That's how it was described. But I didn't read enough into it to find out how this actually worked. Like, I don't know if it was capable of stringing together

any words just based upon what it was seeing. I don't know if it had human intervention where the human was the one actually providing the caption. I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that that was essentially another project that was taken Uh. That was that was being performed by much of the same team, and kind of the hitch Bot was kind of the next step, not directly connected. It was just one of those idea is that that Smith and Zelleri came up

with that they thought was a really interesting concept. So after going through Canada, they went to Germany. It had a lot of adventures in Germany, went to castles, went to another wedding. There's a great picture of a bride giving Hitchpot a little kiss. Yeah and um and uh. Lots of stories of people. All of Hitchbot's journeys, by the way, are chronicled on the website. There are blog posts that tell what happened on each day. Some of them also have embedded videos of the stuff that went

on and also photographs. It's very cute. Then after Germany, they went to the Netherlands for a brief while in the summer, early summer, for a bunch of activities and events that I cannot pronounce. Yes, I'm not even going to attempt a series of festivals with unpronounceable names. And then at least for the American tongue, and then uh, and then it moved over to the good old us of A. Yeah, started in Boston, right, it was gonna go from We're gonna go from Boston to San Francisco.

That was the goal. That was the goal. And it also had a bucket list, which is appropriate since it was a bucket. I have the bucket list in front of me now. Uh, well, the bucket list has a couple of check marks on it. Now. One check mark was um, uh, to do the wave of a sports game anywhere, it didn't matter where it was to do that. Uh. The other one was to see the lights in Times

Square of course in New York City. And there were other there's other stuff along the way, and I'll just mention a few of these because there's probably again fifty different things in Grand Canyon has to be on there. Let's see Grand Canyon. Um uh, you know, I'll have to check out. Yes, it does. See the jaw dropping views of the Grand Canyon. That is one. Yes in Arizona um posed with the Lincoln statue in d C. Was another one. Tan at Myrtle Beach Um experienced the

magic of Walt Disney World in Florida. So it was going to need to actually go south along the Eastern Seaboard. I mean for people who are not from the United States and aren't famili or with our geography, if you were going Boston to San Francisco, you would essentially be setting your sites west. Yeah, just do west, Just go yeah, just go west, and just keep on adjusting your your your journey in orders for you to get to California exactly.

But with this list, it means that you would have need you first would need to go south, because you would have to go south from Boston to well to get to New York City, but also to d C and to Florida. And then this goes all over the place, I mean all over the Midwest. So there are things to do in Illinois like explore the cloud gate and Millennium Park, um stand under the Gateway arch in Missouri.

Just all kinds of things like this, And again it's a it's a relatively long list and with many different states, many different activities, and checked off two items on that list. Yeah, And the reason that only two items were checked off is that Hitchbot met and untimely demise at the hands of a vandal maliciously murdered. Yes, decapitate it. Yeah, can we just can you say murdered when it's a robot? I mean it was disassembled. Yeah, that's what Johnny five

was scared about. No disassembled Johnny five. Um. Yeah, So I'm guessing disassembled is probably the best way of putting it. At some point, you figure there's gonna be another robot getting a delivery with a cardboard box and it'll just be what's in the box, uh, and they'll have the binary uh code for seven as the title of that. Very clever, clever. All right, So this is a weird,

weird ending. So um it is the night prior to this, so it's it's what the end of July, right, because I think this all went down on August one, as when we heard exactly so July thirty one, Um, I think it was a Saturday night and Hitchbot was in Philadelphia and hang hanging out with a vlogger by the name of Jesse Wellens. And it is well documented what they did in their evening, during their evening because you know, Wellen's being a YouTube YouTube personality. Um, it took him

on the town. You kind of did a lot of different things with him. There were other people involved. There's another guy um there with them. His name was Ed Bassmaster, who was another YouTube personality, and they had kind of a fun evening. Yeah. The whole the whole idea was that this is a I mean it was. It was

elevating Hitchbot's profile and elevating the YouTuber's profile. This is this is a dream come true for a YouTube personality because it gives you the chance to interact with a meme while it's at while it's happening, you're not capitalizing it on afterwards. This is this is like a once in a lifetime type deal. It can It can garner you international attention immediately. It really would, because people were

tracking this thing. People were watching exactly where this is and they knew, you know, when it was when it was in their city, they knew where it was, they could walk. I mean, if it said it's been sitting here at this corner of you know, Maine and Elm Street for the last twenty minutes, you could go down to Maine and Elm Street and look at this thing, or pick it up and give it a ride yourself

if you wanted to. In fact, the early part of the trip we didn't talk about this, but it took a long time for it to leave the Boston area.

People in Boston, we're taking it to different parks and different you know, they're kicking out on boats and things and taking you know, selfies with it, and um, it took I think it was more than seven days for it to get out of the Boston area, which I think the team would have found wonderful because it was what was happening was the robot was gathering a series of rich experiences, and the people were gathering the experience of interacting with the robot, which was the purpose for

this thing in the first place. So having it take a really long time to get off any area would not be considered a a an impediment on the behalf of the people running the project. They I'm sure loved it. Oh yeah, in no way is that a failure. That's a that's a wind as fact. So you know, here it is after this fun evening on the thirty feet and they placed it on the bench middle of the night. You know, it's late at night of course dark. They placed it on a park bench, or not a park bench,

but a bench on the city street there. And that's it. I mean, you see a cab driver arrived, think uh. And and that's it. I mean at the end of the video interaction with with Hitchbot at that point. And the next day we wake up to the news that Hitchbot has been murdered. Yes, its head had been removed

from its torso and its arms ripped off. And I gotta ask you this, when you saw the photograph of Hitchbot, because now this is a dramatic photograph, I mean it did it did look a lot like a true crime scene photo in that uh and that horrific as this maybe, I mean Hitchbot's arms were pulled off and placed above its head and um, he was laying in a pile of leaves. It's headless at this point. I mean they're

they're real crime scene photos like that. Now understand that this was starting, it was starting to feel like this is this is the robot equivalent of a serial killer a crime scene. So it was laid out in this light like the staged manner, and uh and very very showy, I guess. And and there were actually websites or you know, blogs that would say, I don't really feel comfortable showing you this image, which is weird because here it's just a bucket with a couple of noodle arms and some

some rubber boots. Right, if you saw this same collection of stuff and a hardware store, you would just think, oh, somebody just left their random shopping right here. That's pretty funny. I never thought of it that way. Yeah, it's like, yeah, you could gather the stuff up at Walmart and put it on the floor and not think twice about it. But now that we know that this is this uh, this this thing that they've created that has a name, uh, now it takes on a different twist, doesn't it take.

It takes a different different feel, which, again you might say, while while it brings the the that particular part of the experiment to an end, it also says a lot, right. It also tells you a lot about robot human interactions and where they can go. It sure does, and you're and you know right away you would think, well, of

course Wellens and bath Master have done this. That's that's the two people, the two characters that were involved at this last and then well and Behold three or day later, two days later, whatever, there comes to this uh secret surveillance video that was taken it in from a nearby store that shows what happened. And someone wanders up in a football jersey and just kick the living heck out of this thing and destroys it. But it's it's shown just on screen. We don't actually see the person kicking

and destroying this thing. We see him kicking in this destroying the area of the bench that that that hitchbot was known to be last, right, And then later everyone was reporting that this video was essentially itself was staged. Yeah, it's a fake video because you can go to that scene and look exactly where it was taken from the same perspective. There's no camera there. Yeah, so it's a fake. And so what's going on here? Because they never have

found the head of hitchpot. I mean they never found the I guess the CPU, the the thing that would tell them PC. Yeah, that would tell them what is what is happening? Like, what what happened to it? So the best guess is just that somebody scavenged it. But you know, in fact that the people behind the scenes, the people behind the project, have said, we don't we don't care to identify the person who did it or

why they did it. That's not important to what we were trying to do with it taking photographs every twenty minutes. I wonder if it captured something and send it without the the the person you know, the purp knowing what had happened, or if or if it just happened to befall within that time frame between when the photos are taken and didn't capture anything, and it's just like everybody else,

they don't know anything. It's possible either way, uh the you know, of course, there was a huge reaction to this both ways. Yeah. Yeah, there were people who were saying, this is awful, this is the worst. You know, it really reflects poorly on the United States that a robot that was capable of safely traveling from one coast of Canada to the other, and also in Germany and also in the Netherlands, gets barely into its arny here in

the United States before it's destroyed seven days. Yeah, that that was a telling um condemnation, if you will, of the United States in general and Philadelphia in particular. You can think of all the different comments that were immediately happening afterwards. A lot of people would say like, well, this happens to real hitchhikers as well, it happens to people well, and then there were a ton of comments that said, well, of course this happened in Philadelphia. Yeah,

there's that. And then there's another group of people that would just respond with something like a big deal. It was a bucket of bolts. Anyways, it was a machine. Yeah, and I mean it's it's again. This ties right back into that robotic human interactions. You might think the experiments over I would argue that the team probably says, no, it's still going. It doesn't matter if the robot is gone.

The continuing conversation around this is still informing us and still giving us a lot more data about how humans view robots, how we can identify with them, we can imprint an emotional response to them, and in fact, they have tweeted out, you know, continuing to tweet out with the robots, saying the robots still loves people, still loved its adventures, which I think needles it even more right.

You made the robot this innocent creature. It reminds me a lot of when um the various Mars rovers when they were like the Phoenix Lander, specifically, when it was nearing the end of its mission, like it had gone well beyond what the mission parameters were and it was to a point where it was no longer going to get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries, and it's essentially the social media team at NASA sent out a final tweet from the robot, keeping in mind the robot was

never tweeting directly. It was always a human being taking data from the robot and then messaging it out. But people identified with that robot, and when that last tweet came out, people cried the watching this thing and they're thinking, they're almost making it into like like it's like you're watching a dog or something like that. That's that's dying. That thing right there is dying and I'm watching it

happen and they're not understanding that. It's like, um, now, I know it's way more complexness, but it's not like, well, it's time to get a new toaster. You know, it's not like a machine that you don't really have any kind of personal um attachment to attachment. Like if my microwave were to malfunction, I think a lot of pain in the butt. I have to go and get a new one. You're not gonna cry. No. But and again that that goes right back into that idea of how

do robots and humans interact? And and we do need to think about this because if we enter into a world where we start treating these relationships is really casual. When stuff happens and people go through an actual grieving experience, we won't be ready for it. But if we know ahead of time, we can say, all right, you know what, we we know this about ourselves. This is something that

is innately human, at least for many people. Yeah, and then you then you think, all right, now I can I can design a product and market a product and and do it in a responsible way that doesn't say this is a weird you know, aberration or anything. No, this is a very human kind of trait that a lot of people have. Sure, whatever elicits from the humans, that's what you're looking for, yeah, and so or at

least that you account for it. Even if that's not the purpose of whatever it is you're making, you at least account for the fact that it exists. And what's interesting is that in the fallout of all of this, we've seen not just the condemnation of an act of violence against what seemed to be an innocent creature that loved adventure and meeting people, or as Smith had called it, a story collecting and story generating machine, like that was

its per us. We've also seen people come together to say, we can't let this be the end of the story. Um we there are a couple of different groups in Philadelphia that had said, let us build a robot two continue on in the spirit of Hitchbot, because I can't stand for hitch Bot story to have ended in the city that I call home. Let's let's let's have a chance to make this right. Yeah, and we're gonna do it. Yeah.

So there are the tech community in Philadelphia has responded with this and actually received some more or less tentative thumbs up from some of the members of the hitch bot team to give this a go. And so there's a group um at that gathered at the hactory. The Hactory, Yeah, it's like a factory hactory in West Philadelphia. Um, this was this is very recent when this happened. And they have come up with an eye yea that they're calling the Philly love Bot. I don't like the sound of that. Yeah,

an odd choice for a name. Wait, but in the brotherly love Okay, I don't want to I don't wanna take this in the wrong direction or anything. But we're not talking about a sex spot. Okay, okay, sex But I didn't want to just come right out and say it. But it seems like I've heard of products like this. Yeah no, not not that kind of love. But this is more of a love for all mankind and robots kind of what kind of bought podcast if I wandered into Yeah, no, I'm not going to do another bait

and switch on this sky. I already promised you I wasn't gonna do not doing it this time, honest. So they said that, Um, the idea they have is they would build a robot that was designed to be passed from one person to another, so it's not designed to hitchhike from one location to another location. There's no location requirement,

at least in their initial approach. Instead, what they want is to design a robot that when you, when you take possession of it, when someone gives it to you, you are tasked with performing a good deed, however you define it, and it gets documented by the robot itself. The robot you take along with you to do whatever this good deed maybe idea, and then you pass it on. It's like a pay it forward. You pass the robot onto someone else and it is their duty now to

go out and do a good deed. And the idea to kind of a tone for the horrible murder of hitchbot by promoting good deeds, and the robot is the kind of the almost like a totem for that. I was going to say, I like this idea, but you could do the same thing with a with a carved stick. You could hand a carved stick to somebody. Now that you're in possession of the stick, it's your duty to do a good deed and pass the stick onto somebody else. It doesn't have to be uh, something that collects and

gathers the information. But I guess that keeps everybody kind of honest, doesn't it. Well? Yeah, and I think also, you know you I. They also are planning on having the robot, which I am going to guess it is going to be another really another computer or not so much a robot. They're going to have it capable of

interacting with you, just as the hitchbot could. So in other words, there will still be that robot human interaction element that will play a part in this experiment, but the nature of the the overall experiment, the the perceived

purpose will be different. Now. Isn't it funny? Because I wonder what some people are going to consider a good deed too, because there might be some comical examples of what people consider to be their good deed for humanity, like one I I I. I imagine we would see everything from someone saying, all right, I'm gonna take this robot with me while me and my company while we

go out and we clean up a neighborhood. That could be one, or it could be I'm going to set this robot here on the corner so it can watch me as I stopped traffic so this mama duck and her baby ducks can get across the street. It could be anything. Yeah, like oh man, you almost filled your beer, but I I saved you. I'm passing this thing on. And see that that also again because of you Look, if you look at it as the as an experiment,

that's still meaningful data. Right. That's true. It's it's interesting, you know, it's kind of like a joke, but it's also that's humanity too, That's true. And that's exactly what the initial goal of this whole thing was. I mean, it's to see what happens. It wasn't the goal of getting this thing across Canada, because they could put in a box and ship if they want, or just have a trucking company hall it. Like we said, you know, one shot all the ways straight across. But the idea

was to see what happens along the way. It's like the journey is better than the destination exactly. Yeah, And that it's those experiences that were important and that documenting culture. And we're talking about an emerging culture now, not just tradition, not just the embedded culture that's been around for generations. We're talking about an emerging culture of technology and our daily lives intermingling on a level that has been it's unprecedented.

We've never seen it like that, and it grows every day, so fascinating, really a fascinating experiment. I wouldn't call it a failure at all. I mean, I'm sad that the Hitchbot didn't get further along in its journey so that more people could experience it and that we could have more stories. But it's all right, because the story continues. It's just the Hitchbot chapter is over. So when you look at it that way, it's actually really interesting and inspiring.

And you know, of course, you might say, well, I hope that the next robot meets with more success and doesn't have the same kind of encounter. But if we do see these kind of encounters happen again and again, then we have new questions to ask, like, why is this happening? Uh? You know, what are what are the

motivations behind it? Are there things we need to look at as a as a society, not just not because we want to protect robots, but are there underlying issues that this is just an indicator of it, and may be there are things we need to fix it's real anger and deep seated anger against robots, or or even just one of those situations where clearly the person who was trying to scavenge it wanted to get it for the parts to sell for some reasons. And then that's well,

if that's in fact the answer, then you're you. You might say, all right, you know, this is yet another indicator that there are conditions that maybe we should look at and really talk about. And yes, this is a kind of trivial way of highlighting that, and it's stuff that we already know, but it's another way to say, think about this. I mean, we're really, we're really talking about compassion, and on a level, that is a very you know, human trait, a very innate trait in us.

Maybe we should apply that to our fellow humans, to not just to the robots, even even the even the humans that cause damage to the robots, we should show compassion too, because we don't know the reason behind it, and there may be reasons that we can't even identify with because we're not in that situation, and that's all the more reason to show compassion. And that's exactly what they're Again. I keep going back this, but that's exactly what they were looking for when they started this whole

experiment a couple of years ago. So this has really been fascinating and I can't wait to see what the next phase will bring to us. Can I ask you one question before we leave here? And I think we had discussed this, but only briefly and we didn't really get into much detail. But um, had you not known about hitchpot, right, had you never heard of this whole thing exactly you passed it on the on the city

streets driving, would you stop to pick it up? None a chance at all that I would stop because and you made me think about this because I was coming to it from the perspective of knowing about Hitchbot. If I saw hitch Bot, I'd think, holy crap, there's the hitchhiking robot. We've got to take part in this. This is something special. And I feel the exact same way.

But not knowing about Hitchbot, not knowing about it, and seeing a bucket that has electronics attached to it, even with the happy face, maybe particularly with the happy face, I might think, oh, what this is like a suspicious device of something I thought? I said, it looks a lot, an awful lot like an I E. D. And I thought it's not too far off in the description. I know that they're a little more um I guess camouflaged

in the way that they typically do those things. But this just seems to me like not a good idea to pick something up, like, you know, something like this up on the street and you know, strap it in the car next to your kids. Yeah, not really, but I mean, knowing what it is, Yeah, of course you'd want to do that. You'd want to you know, it would be a great experience for you and your family, you know, to to do something with us, even if you'd drive it a mile or five miles or whatever.

Just take a quick photograph with it and say you were part of that journey. That's kind of cool. It's actually kind of interesting to me that Hitchbot spent seven days in Boston because Boston is also where we had the Aquitine Hunger Force Moononite bomb scare. It was in two thousand seven and it was in Boston. Yeah, yeah, that's with the neon or not. I'm sorry. L D. Yeah, um,

well yeah, yeah, you can tell them what it was. Yeah, the the L E ED There were these two characters from Aquitine Hunger Force, these two Moonites from the Moon they look like uh like, yeah, the eight bit characters from a really crappy video game that they're specifically made to look like that they're two dimensional, they're they when they turn sideways, you don't see him anymore because they're gone.

And as they're hilarious. They are hilarious. They are incredibly inappropriate, as is everything on Aquitine Hunger Force, but they are hilarious. And there was a publicity stunt where uh these l e ed signs of the two characters were put up in various locations, and in Boston it caused a bomb scare.

People thought that maybe it was the indication of an explosive divice ice nearby, and so they were dismantled, and it very quickly became kind of a joke slash a discussion about you have to be very careful in the way you present these kind of guerrilla marketing attempts because in a in a post nine eleven world they can be misinterpreted. It was post nine eleven and pre marathon

bombing too, Yeah, so it's kind of in between. But um, they were on high alert there for a while about these signs, and then you know, chepishly Cartoon Network had to say, oh, that was us, yeah, and I here's what happened. But in fact they were a little reluctant to say that was us. Well, but you know, then

again bad press is still pressed. That's true. So I'm actually amazed that the that hitchbot didn't meet with any hitches in Boston based on that um and and as you when you asked that question, you gave the qualifier, Hey, you've never heard of hitchbot and you see this thing on the side of the road. I definitely would have wondered what the heck it was, and I probably would have thought I might not want to get too close

to that, just in case. Yeah. Sure, And imagine if you were, uh, you know somewhere in Canada, you know where it's it's wide open, you know farmland, and uh, you know, there's it's it's a mile between houses, and this thing is propped up on its it's its legs and its tripod seat there out in the middle of nowhere.

I don't think I'd stopped and pick In that case, I probably would stop, only because I would think who the heck would set up something sinister in the middle of nowhere where you are not likely to affect much of anything at all, and that's how they get you, whereas I would be more concerned about the the city location, where the the opportunity is higher. Yea, yeah, I just see it as like and that was the last thing

that he thought. Well, I already told you that I was worried that my obituary from yesterday was going to say choked to death on twizzlers. So it's actually much worse. Yeah, no, especially since I hate twizzlers all right. Well, at any rate, this was really a lot of fun to talk about, and it was fun to kind of, you know, think about the weird adventures, which are all, like I said, documented. You can go to the hitchbot website and read up on the different days and events and things that it

encountered in the people it met. So many successful journeys and so many events and things that had happened that happened, and and it posted about all that stuff, and all those interactions are recorded in some way, which is great, so you can actually go back and relive those journeys.

And I do hope that we see some further experiments that that are in the same spirit, whether or not it's another hitchhiking thing, or it's like the Philly love butt, or I know, it's like it's like I'm ten years old. I can't you can't say that, and I still giggle every time. But you know, I see what you mean. I anticipate a bunch of copycat hitchpots popping up. Um, here's another little thing that I I we didn't get to really talk about this, but I think the very

next thing we're going to see out of this. Unfortunately, and this is just my gut feeling. You said, somebody we scrapped the head, you know, the control unit. I have a feeling we're going to see a photograph of that show up somewhere that's going to be sent to the creators of a hitch pot, which to the creators

probably would just be yet another data point. Probably, Yeah, But I see it as going like the way a real crime against a human would have gone, Um, you know, and that there will be next a kind of a taunting note sent to them as well, which you know, I hope I'm wrong that if that does happen, though it is interesting because it's just that whoever does it obviously would think of it as uh or at least I would guess this is armchair psychology, but I would

imagine that they would think of it as like a joke. That you know, I'm treating this as if it were a real person. Meanwhile, there are other people who think that's sick because they do think of hitch Pot as at least some in some way similar to a person. And this is again so that we're clear here, I read a lot of true crime, so it's not that I'm just thinking about this all the time. I mean, I'm just saying around the one year anniversary, just pay

attention to what's going on the news. It might happen, might not happen. I don't have any inside info or anything like that. I could just as easily be that someone saw it and thought, oh I want a tablet. PC could be and it could it could have ended up in a dumpster half a block away. Yeah, yeah, it's it's hard to say, but this was a lot of fun. Scott, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you again. I appreciate it, and likewise I had

a good time doing it. Fantastic. If you guys want to listen to more amazing content that's Scott and Ben generate all the time. You've gotta check out car Stuff. It's a great show. Shucks, it's it's tons of fun. I've I've had so much fun listening to those episodes. Uh. I thought you're gonna say those clowns right there, he said, I've had so much fun listening to and there's a little positive Well that's true outside of the room, like in the studio or in the office rather well. I

appreciate it, Thank you very much. Yea. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for future topics or you have you know your own perspective on hitchbot and what that experiment was all about, let me know. Similar Mel The addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter the handle of both of those it's tech stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com