200
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
From a NASA blog post made the day after contact was lost:
The dust storm that is affecting Opportunity has greatly intensified.
The atmospheric opacity (tau) over the rover has increased to a record ...
- 12k
94
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
Opportunity does not literally speak English, so no such message was expressed in those terms. However, Opportunity did communicate the information that it had a low battery and it was dark outside.
...
- 1,118
88
votes
Did a Tesla car collide with a Russian robot?
It's a PR stunt, and a very bad one at that. There are several debunkings out there, e.g. from ElecTrek, or (the best IMHO) from DÆrik @ YouTube.
Strongest points made by DÆrik:
The press release by ...
- 19.2k
47
votes
Accepted
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
Other answers give good technical answers to what the last message would actually have looked like, but I thought it worth tackling the angle of where the quote came from.
Wikipedia cites an article ...
- 9,012
18
votes
Accepted
Can robots develop prejudices on their own?
The original article is available:
Indirect Reciprocity and the Evolution of Prejudicial Groups, Roger M. Whitaker, Gualtiero B. Colombo & David G. Rand, Scientific Reports Volume 8, Article ...
- 145k
16
votes
Was Opportunity's last message to Earth "My battery is low and it's getting dark"?
This Metro article cites a tweet by Keri Bean, an engineer who worked on the opportunity mission who had Oppy’s final measurement tattooed on her arm.
This tattoo means more to me than just Oppy. ...
- 300
7
votes
Have autonomous military machines killed people without human supervision?
Yes. As early as the Falkland War, though this is eminently dependent on the definition of 'autonomous', 'machines' and 'supervision'.
'Fire and forget' munitions have existed for quite some time, and ...
- 1,686
7
votes
Accepted
Is this a woman imitating a robot or a real robot?
It's a human model. The act is a marketing stunt to promote the game "Detroit: become human" which features such androids as characters you play.
You can clearly see less "androidy" androids in this ...
- 78.9k
7
votes
Did the Mall Robot Commit Suicide?
"Commiting suicide" colloquially means ending your life. As a robot doesn't have life, let's assume it means "ending your functional existence".
Suicide requires self-consciousness (being aware of ...
- 19.2k
6
votes
Accepted
Is there a woman named Lilly who is engaged to a robot she built?
TL,DR: it all boils down to a single, poorly-verified self-report. But since the whole claim is a report about one person's feelings and plan, there's little substance in the first place.
The story ...
4
votes
Accepted
Is Boston Dynamics developing the quadruped robot in this video?
Yes, Boston Dynamics is a real company, and they are really doing this stuff. In addition to all the videos of their various robots on YouTube, here is one example paper jointly authored with a ...
- 16.8k
4
votes
Is there a woman named Lilly who is engaged to a robot she built?
The story is based on this dead twitter account which was deleted by its owner. A google search for her twitter username returns the following top result:
A google Image search for her Twitter ...
- 15.9k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible