“It can be a funny old world and no mistake,” as they sometimes say in England (but don’t ask me who “they” are because I’m sworn to secrecy).
If you’d asked me yesterday what I would be blogging about today, I think it’s fair to say that the topic of teaching a robot dog to pee beer into a cup would not have appeared at the top of the list – it probably wouldn’t have even made the Top 10 – but, still and all, here we are.
The thing is that my chum Steve Brown at Cadence just sent me a message saying “You have to see this” accompanied by a link to this video on YouTube.
In this video, we see a young man called Michael Reeves – strangely reminiscent of Beaker on The Muppet Show – who manages to lay his hands on one of Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dogs (which costs $75,000 on a good day) and sets out to teach it to pee beer into a cup.
On the one hand, I wish Michael didn’t swear so much. I know I’m going to be an old fuddy-duddy when I grow up, but I really don’t think bad language brings anything to the party. My dear old dad never swore to my knowledge in his life (although, now I come to think about it, I’m sure he found a few choice words when the Germans shot him and blew him up with a grenade whilst he was on a reconnaissance mission on what they considered to be their side of the playing field). Dad used to be a dancer on the variety hall stage prior to WWII (see The Times They Are a-Changin’), so he saw a lot of comedians, and he had little respect for those who needed to use swear words to get a laugh.
On the other hand, swearing apart, Michael – who is obviously extremely intelligent — comes over as an ebullient, fun-filled guy with whom one could spend a happy time learning a lot of “stuff.” All I can say is that you have to watch the video and also read some of the comments, which vary from “If Tony Stark had brain damage” to “His robot will really succeed in Ireland.”
What say you? Is our future going to be a dystopian nightmare filled with Spot’s descendants hunting us down like dogs (Oh, the irony)? Or can we look forward to a joy-filled epoch when the beer runs plentiful and cold?