We thought the rider fell off or something and it was going to crash. Then it turned and kept mowing. Park Roomba!
Another picture:
ok what happens if this hits a child though?
I feel like things like this should have their safety system as public review of sorts, like a safety system public domain. Assuming this is on public property, but also if you sell to the general public too? It’s a pipe dream anway. It’s just interesting.
Hopefully a major lawsuit at the very least.
Or a bad Steven King movie.
Is there any other kind?
(I kid, there were a few good ones… Stand By Me for one…)
I imagine they would make excellent fertilizer.
Plays Circle of Life from Lion King
Tactical EMP’s are necessary now.
First thing I thought of was "Maximum Overdrive ". Loved that movie when I was a kid.
“This machine just called me an asshole.”
“You sure make love like a hero.”
deleted by creator
Seeing this picture, my first instinct was to tell op to stand in front of it. Worst that happens is an easy paycheck.
Run and grab a package of hotdogs and we can finally get the answer to an age old question.
Put a pile of sticks halfway between a mowed area and an area that hasn’t been cut.
Draw a line right in the middle of the camera lense? If that doesn’t do anything then a stick person?
Or just don’t vandalise government property which is there to make life better.
I mean to be fair these are more intrusive thought type things. I definitely probably would never actually do anything like that…
Worst that happens is an easy paycheck.
I would say worse that happens is a lawn mowing robot runs over me and I end up in the ICU.
And then you have every right to sue the beejezus outta whoever unleashed a robot into public that has super fast spinning knives but no obstacle avoidance programming.
Cool. You get cut to ribbons by a lawn mower. I have enough health problems as it is.
Or hacking it to mow a symbol of “I thought what I’d do was I’d become one of those deaf mutes”.
deleted by creator
Not sure on these larger industrial mowers, but the little WORX robot mower I have does have a programming port open for firmware updates. There’s been some custom firmwares out there; no need for signed code or anything like that.
deleted by creator
That’s one expensive goat.
Never seen a gas powered automatic lawnmower, only electric ones.
This is the size of a huge riding mower you only see used by parks departments and the like.
It is a “zero-turn” mower. Best suited for larger lawns as they can cover large areas more easily. And of course they are more nimble.
They have a larger cutting area than lawn-tractors, but smaller than brush-hog style mowers that attach to the PTO connection on a tractor. We have all three which get used for different scenarios.
For the curious https://youtu.be/t1__h7vnnKY?si=K-RBu5beMPJYNNMn
Starts of nice and calmly, then the editor goes full on with the metal music thrashing for the title sequence. What a trip!
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/t1__h7vnnKY?si=K-RBu5beMPJYNNMn
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
don’t like that.
This better not have put someone out of the job
i’m more worried about giving robots literal weapons but that’s also a very good point too.
or…?
I guess I can piss on it
Doesnt look battery powered so that would only help it. The controller is likely sealed against weather too
It didn’t. The guy was still there to get the robot to its location and make sure it was working all right and I’m guessing he still had other maintenance to do in the park beyond mowing. But he did get to stay out of the sun on a hot day.
Throw a tennis ball in its path and see what happens. It must be safe, right? Right‽
Mowing over a tennis ball isn’t harmful, I don’t see what this would prove.
The tennis ball is just an analog for anything actually harmful. Testing its object detection without creating genuine hazards.
What things the size and shape of a tennis ball are you concerned about it running over?
If you’re worried about it running over a person, use something that looks like a person as your analogue.
Depends who you ask, eh. If your tiny pet gets underneath there it’s gonna be a bad day.
Fortunately, most animals do not willingly go anywhere near running combustion engines.
You should meet my dog. A decent robot would be more likely to quickly stop than most human lawn mower drivers though I think.
Well, not anymore. /s
That is fortunate.
You really shouldn’t be taking your hamster to the park in the first place.
True.
How about my foot while I’m having a lie down? Would that be safe?
Make sure your foot stays close to the rest of your body. If your foot is sitting out in the middle of the grass by itself you’re already in serious trouble without the lawnmower being involved.
God, I always do that, don’t I. Nevermind. I need to get myself together.
I was going to make a morbid joke about the driver having already fallen off and into the blades before you took the photo, but the fact that there’s no seat on that mower defeated that plan.
I was there with a group of parents and kids for a teen meetup. We did think he fell off at first. Then it turned by itself and we were all like “wtf?”
Well I’m glad it ended up being automated.
In this particular instance, I am sort of indifferent about it, because I don’t think sitting on a riding mower is an especially taxing job and the guy still had to be there to put it in the right place and make sure nothing went wrong.
The lack of seat is why they fell off!
The lack of seat is why they fell off!
Not bad, not bad at all.
Happy Wheels?
It’s an old flash game where falling off of your lawnmower and getting mown by it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence.
Ahh, ok, lol. Yeah, never played it. Thanks for sharing.
I had a job offer at a place that makes robotic lawnmowers, but they required you to go to Florida and Texas every year for “field testing”. We have sunshine 300 days a year here, and we also don’t have barbaric laws stripping people of their rights, so I turned it down.
Wow I didn’t know they were commercially available. That is so cool!
Parkba!
Automation isn’t the enemy.
As ever, the owner class that hoards and wages economic war on you though automation for their exclusive benefit at their society’s expense are your enemy, whether you would fight them or not.
Arguing that we should “save” back breaking, repetitive unnatural movement, manual labor jobs that break human bodies by the time they’re 40 is the WRONG hill to die on. Fight for the citizenry to reap the benefits of automation through taxation, not to keep shitty jobs robots can do faster and better. Fight to change the economy so that everyone doesn’t need meaningless jobs machines can do better so we can have actual time to live our lives.
Taxing the fuck out of automation would let everyone win, because a heavily taxed robot is still far cheaper for the company than a human or possibly several humans for that one robot would be, so automation is here either way. We can riot to change our economy to benefit from this technology as we should, or we can be steamrolled yet again by the dictates of the affluent who will demand and get all the benefits and none of the responsibility if not confronted and countered on revolutionary terms.
Please pick the former. There’s no dignity or meaning to be had shuffling boxes around in an Amazon warehouse. Begging the owners to let us try to continue to compete with literal purpose built repetitive labor machines is not the way.
It’s too bad that the first things to be automated are the tasks that people don’t mind doing, leaving the real shitty tasks to be done by people. Riding around on a lawnmower has to be one of the most enjoyable forms of manual labour. Now the robots get the good jobs and we’re left with the backbreaking monotonous bullshit.
Fun fact: The Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. In many cases, they built the machines they would later destroy.
What they opposed was the ownership structure. The fact that they could be 30x more productive, yet be paid less than before because the required skill level was lower, and the working conditions were now dangerous and demeaning.
Yet when someone says “luddite” now, what do you think? A dummy who’s afraid of having cool stuff?
Put the corporate tax rate back up to 40% or more and implement a 10% robot tax on top of that. Then after that, implement a UBI starting at $1000 a month for US citizens with no strings attached, increasing with inflation over time. Solved for the next decade.
The top marginal tax rate should be 100%. The bottom marginal tax rate should be negative.
Now do AI!
Good points, but I have one thing to add. You shouldn’t tax automation. You should increase corporate taxes for all companies. If you funded a UBI with that, it would solve lots of unemployment related problems: crime, poverty, etc. But it’s hard, simple but hard.
Are these the immigrants that are stealing all our jobs?
They took our jerbs!
This is what people should be fearing. Studies have shown that when immigrants come in and “take jobs”, they pay taxes, and buy goods to create a life here, effectively replacing the job they took (since we need people who make beds for them to sleep in, food for them to eat, etc).
This is automation that’s ACTUALLY taking our jobs. This automation doesn’t pay taxes, and doesn’t replace the job it takes.
You sure the automation doesn’t pay taxes…?
Very true, but let’s also keep in mind that automation doesn’t have to be a social evil. If our economic and political systems were better oriented toward lifting up society’s disadvantaged and keeping extreme individual/family wealth in check, automation could benefit all. With better social safety nets (or a UBI), government-sponsored job training (perhaps paid for by taxes on automation), and incentives for starting small businesses, automation could mean less human drudgery in the workforce, and more efficient economic outcomes for all.
I’m not optimistic about that given our track record as a species, but it’s possible.
Unfortunately the system has laid the framework for it to destroy itself when automation becomes ubiquitous. Imagine if y2k was inevitable but the engineers who’s jobs it was to fix it hands were tied by the software company’s forcing them to install more and more bugged software.
I wish you were wrong, but unfortunately I think I agree with you.
TL;DR: automated production is good if and only if the people own the means.
If we can fight the owners to keep our shitty back breaking jobs and win, we should have fought the owners to rebuild our economy for automation profits to largely benefit the people from the bottom up.
If we the peasant masses even can win against the tiny owner class oligarchs, lets fight for the right thing. And if we can’t win, well then it’s all masturbation anyway and they’ll do what they want.
It’s irrational to fight for “we demand to continue to break our backs making your shit instead of robots so we can continue to subsist on menial laborer wages with broken backs!” in any event. That’s some coal miner excuse for logic.
I have heard an idea floated around that the companies that make these types of automation devices would pay massive taxes on them, and that tax would pay for UBI. I’m not sure how the math works, but to me that sounds like the ultimate endgame. Then we can all enjoy our lives without needing to do tedious or backbreaking work.
Absolutely it’s the best way forward. The catch is that it’s hard to calculate. If I write an app that saves someone 3 minutes of each work day, how much am I taxed on what I automated? We can just tax the rich, and assume they automate away everyone’s jobs.
I don’t fear this. Automate EVERYTHING NOW
Speak for yourself. I still want to jerk off manually.
Switches jerk off machine from auto to manual.
100% let’s do this.
