My mother always warned me never to pick up hitchhikers.
She would then go into morbid detail describing all the psychotic axe murderers and depraved sex maniacs who were out there trying to thumb rides with an innocent like myself.
I would usually just nod and say, “Of course I wouldn’t do that, mom,” while inwardly feeling a bit insulted because — being far from innocent — I had already used my handy opposable digit many times before to travel the roads around my rural hometown.
But now some professors want you to completely ignore good old mom’s advice and start picking up hitchhikers. Well, they don’t want you to pick up just any possibly deranged hitchhiker, but rather the one they’ve created in a science lab.
Sure, that sounds much safer.
Late next month, a robot named hitchBOT will begin a cross-Canada journey, thumbing rides from one side of the country to the other… and likely freaking out motorists along the way.
The hitchhiking robot is a collaborative art project and social experiment from the minds of Ryerson professor Frauke Zeller and McMaster professor David Harris Smith. HitchBOT isn’t exactly the most sophisticated robot out there, though. It does have a hitchhiking arm, but it can’t move on its own. Fashioned “like somebody has cobbled together odds and ends to make the robot, such as pool noodles, bucket, cake saver, garden gloves, Wellies, and so forth,” according to a statement from its creators; however, the robot does have a microphone and camera. So, the ‘bot can detect motion and speech, and even answer questions and engage in conversation, forming answers based on a Wikipedia database and conversational dialogue models. To keep its battery charged, the chatty creation will ask people giving it a lift if they can plug it into their cars’ cigarette lighters.
What makes this little experiment so interesting is normally people tend to mistrust robots. If you’ve seen one of the Terminator or Matrix movies, or any science fiction at all, you know robots inevitably go bonkers and try to “Kill All Humans.”
But, hitchBOT kind of turns that concept inside out.
“Usually, we are concerned whether we can trust robots, e.g. as helpers in our homes,” said the robot’s creators in a recent news piece. “But this project takes it the other way around and asks: Can robots trust human beings?”
What a silly question. Of course, you can’t trust humans. Have these professors never read a newspaper? Aside from the dangerous axe murderers and depraved sex maniacs supposedly roaming the open roads, there are people who break into houses just to swipe a few feet of copper wire for some easy cash. What’s going to happen when one of these less-than-honest folks happens upon a rubber boot-wearing robot standing on the side of the road hitching a ride?
Its creators say they are “cautiously optimistic” that hitchBOT will make it all the way to Victoria thanks to the kindness of strangers. But if not, they do have spares or “siblings” on hand, just in case.
So, this summer if you happen to see a robot thumbing a ride, you’re not hallucinating, so stop and give hitchBOT a lift… he’s probably not an axe-wielding rapist. Probably.
For more on the project, go to hitchbot.me.
