Helpless robots: bullied, but can't fight back
Helpless is usually used to describe humans' or animals' status of lacking power to do anything to defend or protect themselves. As human beings, we have experience feeling helpless in our life, when we are attacked, misunderstood or thrown into a very bad situation. Being abused or bullied is often one of these situations.
Abuse and bullying not only happen between humans, but also between human and robots. In the videos, we can find people hitting robots for fun, or deliberately stopping robots from achieving their goal. The robots, usually defenseless, didn’t seem to have any intention or capability to fight against those who bully them. When being attacked, they struggled, and seemed very helpless, but their reaction didn't stop the continuing bully actions.
The video below showed a collection of different scenes from Boston Dynamics videos, in which robots were bullied by people. What could be often seen is that people kicked the robots heavily for multiple times. They have done such actions sometimes for testing the stableness of robots, and sometimes just for fun.
The robots tried so hard to stand on the ground and to keep stable. When they finally managed to not fall down, they were kicked again, or even being thrown heavy objects. In most situations, the robots were alone. No friend. No ally. No one to protect or help them. All they could do was obeying humans' commands, and waiting for the suffering to stop. They didn't know when the torture would end, and what would come next. They couldn't decide their own fate.
They were helpless at that time. And they are always helpless, during their entire life.
They are helpless creatures by nature.
- Hi hi, I'm a little, ordinary, not-very-good-looking robot. Nice to meet you.
- What? You want to know what it feels like to be helpless？
- Okay.
- Being helpless is like walking alone in an endless tunnel. You want to look forward, but there's no light or hope. You want to escape, but you can't. There's no way out, especially for us robots. You don't have control on both your birth and your death. All you can do is suffering and tolerating. When you're attacked to death and broken into pieces, humans can still find a way to rebuild you ...
- ... and everything horrible will start again.
There are exceptions. Some of the robots do not just wait and tolerate. They take an action.
In the video above, the robot was hit and kicked by some kids. In order to escape from a kid's potential bullying behavior, it intentionally ran to the kid's parent. This was the action to save itself from being hit. However, it could only decrease the possibility of being attacked. Bullying still exists. If they can only escape, rather than fight back, they'll never really protect themselves and end the bullying from human beings. Facing such powerful enemies, they are still helpless in some sense.