I think it's awesome. But, it obvious that the current implementation will inspire the creeps in lots of people. Sci-fi horror has put an unfortunate bad rap on robotic tentacles and chromed vertebrae.
Are we really wired for it, though? I've personally never had that fear.
Perhaps it's a little more nurture than nature?
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In Experiment 2, observers watched edited videotapes that showed models reacting either fearfully to toy snakes and nonfearfully to artificial flowers (SN+/FL-) or vice versa (FL+/SN-). SN+/FL- observers acquired a fear of snakes but not of flowers; FL+/SN- observers did not acquire a fear of either stimulus.
In Experiment 3, monkeys solved complex appetitive discriminative (PAN) problems at comparable rates regardless of whether the discriminative stimuli were the videotaped snake or the flower stimuli used in Experiment 2. Thus, monkeys appear to selectively associate snakes with fear."
Experiment 1 shows that monkeys become afraid of snakes through watching videos of other monkeys being afraid of snakes. Experiment 2 shows that monkeys don't acquire a fear of flowers if shown a video of other monkeys being afraid of flowers. Experiment 3 shows that monkeys can still be conditioned in other tasks using videos of either flowers or snakes.
Further, if there's a learned fear of snakes, that might not be coincidence, even if it's not genetic.
"Although considerable controversy has existed over the extent to which this fear of snakes is “innate” as opposed to based on learning, current evidence suggests that learning is necessary for the fear to manifest itself, at least for some primate species in which wild-reared but not laboratory-reared monkeys show a fear of snakes (see Mineka & Cook, 1988, for a review). For example, Mineka and Cook demonstrated that laboratory-reared rhesus monkeys who were initially unafraid of snakes rapidly acquired a fear of snakes after watching wild-reared model monkeys exhibit a strong fear of snakes (Cook, Mineka, Wolkenstein, & Laitsch, 1985; Mineka, Davidson, Cook, & Keir, 1984). The naive laboratory reared observers initially reached rapidly for food placed adjacent to a series of stimuli, including a real snake, toy snakes, and neutral objects."
Humans are wired for noticing snakes. There are neurological mechanisms [1] that have evolved in humans to prioritize visual detection of snakes [2] and other common threat-related stimuli. I don't know what the science says about this perceptual mechanism being inherently linked to a fear response, but it would make sense given the hypothesized selection pressure that gave rise to it (i.e., not only noticing, but avoiding, the snake before it bites me raises the chances my genes will be passed on)
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_detection_(nervous_sys... 2 - http://childstudycenter.rutgers.edu/Publications_files/LoBue...
An analogy might be, many people are afraid of heights, and fewer people are afraid of water. That's despite the fact that water is also dangerous. But none of this proves or disproves the notion that fear of heights may be "hardcoded".
If you had a lifelike stuffed tiger and you posed it in contexts where it wasn't immediately obvious that it wasn't real, I bet you'd get some amazing startle reactions. It sure works with dinosaurs, even though dinosaurs haven't existed for millions of years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSup2gj2Gn4
It's about just as common as the chromed tentacles, and often co-occurs (2001, Terminator, Matrix, probably more).
All my instincts are screaming "evil thing!"
Is it really too much work to plug in a charging lead by hand?
But as someone who can't afford to buy a Tesla, and who wouldn't spend that kind of money on a car even if I had it, I'd rather see the R&D going into more affordable, more practical EVs that I might actually consider purchasing.
I'm tired of seeing this fallacy of "one thing being developed means that another thing is being put on the sideline". It looks to me like Tesla have the best people on the jobs they need to be on, and just adding "more" isn't going to speed things up more than having more mothers will speed up pregnancy.
I was wondering if Tesla would introduce conductive charging at some point; install a base in your garage, park on top of it, car's charged by morning. Perhaps not feasible with the amount of energy they need to transfer?
Build sports car
Use that money to build an affordable car
Use that money to build an even more affordable car
While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-p... (August 2006)
Oops, I meant "affordable" but "adorable" works too I guess. :-)
There are several much simpler ways a robot car could
connect itself for charging
Today, you wait in your car until the people in front of you finish charging.
Tomorrow, you leave your car in line and go get dinner.
I'm wishing I still had my gasoline-powered car at that point.
As the cars get more autonomous, being able to initialize charging robotically (either in a supercharger-queue, or when the car parks itself at home) is useful.
was considerably more impressive at snake speed!
Snake version will always be slow due to the number of motors needed, imo.