$20,000 Robo Turtle
August 9, 2023
By NZB3
“Meet Cornelia, the Kiwi-built robo-turtle”says Newstalk ZB newsvertising.
“It looks like a turtle and swims like a turtle, but this Kiwi-built green machine is more robot than reptile.”
Because, Jamie Morton (reporter,) it is 100% AUT robot turtle and 0% reptile. But you were going for a Star Wars riff and I can respect that.
“It’s already revealed much about its impressive athletic abilities,”
None of this “much revealed” will we hear of in this article, of course. But at least there’s a link to once-trustworthy Nature magazine.
“Ultimately, it’s hoped that Cornelia..might inspire a new generation of turtle-inspired underwater robots to aid the conservation…”
Hope! Hope? Where are our results, AUT? $20,000 taxpayer grant and it’s ‘hope’. Worse, it’s not hope that we’ll actually unlock the secrets of turtle logos. It’s hope that this bad robot will lead to more! More grants. More PhD trajectories for people like Nick van der Geest here. Hope, I suppose, that their accidemic posts will not be disestablished because of their pretty turtle toys making for good publicity and using the CONSERVATION buzword.
Let me quickly re-cap an earlier post about AUT on Anarkiwi..
Oh? The AUT staff don’t want to be made redundant? The COVID Panic tanked AUT so now it can’t afford to keep them employed?
All I want to know is did these 170 staff fight the Panic or were they 100% behind it? Did they consent to lockdowns, jabs, masks, etc? Did they back the panic and the mandates? The money-printing, the subsidy, the con, the economic damage?
Because if they did collaborate with smashing their own industry and now it’s hit home they’ve lost their job….well. Pick a conviction and stick to it guys.” – Anarkiwi (December 2022)Ref. “attempt by one of the country’s largest universities to axe more than 100 staff. The Auckland University of Technology planned to make 170 academic staff redundant, but” – RNZ (December 2022)
“creating their own robot version offered a way for the AUT team to avoid the ethical issues of working with actual animals.”
So there’s another horrible goal to go with the Ultimate Goal: Ethics avoidance! They literally built a morality-avoiding robot! Trying to make up for cut-backs in the humanities and the woeful standard of university philosophy? A- This will not work. B- Look how badly it works when we put a moralty-avoiding robot in the Prime Minister’s office.
“In their study, supported with a $200,000 grant from the Government’s Science for Technological Innovation fund, the authors said “we have accomplished this without any animal testing.” Another buzz word to go with CONSERVATION. As if marine biologists were going to do animal testing on a turtle anyway rather than make observations of them in nature? Saying ‘without animal testing’ makes it sound like the alternative to this experiment involved injecting men’s aftershaves and cologne into the turtle’s eyes to see if we could get them to smell like Winston Peters’ breath.
“We hope this work will help inspire others to develop robots as a substitute for their biological counterpart.”
No. I hope it will not!
We’ve been taxed $200,000 for a better Zuru Robofish (turtle edition) the best selling childrens toy from Christmas 2013. I remember buying them for kids 10 years ago and you can still buy them now (image: left.)
The AUT one is worse though. Despite the misleading video you can look closely and see that the turtle isn’t even free-roaming. It’s an appendage attached to a rail made to resemble a turtle!
I feel cheated clicking on this link that silently invited the reader to think real turtles had been replicated and released into the ocean. They would swim under their own power in Earth’s oceans sending back high-def video and metadata via Turtlecom. We might see some amazing stuff from the animal world and perhaps find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Nope. Just a $20,000 enlargement of RoboTurtle but without batteries included.
So……..We can study a fake mechanical model of real turtles instead of turtles themselves. But we did that for Climate Science too instead of studying the climate we study models. So we’ll likely end up with results that say ‘Global Turtle’ is ‘Warming’ and we need to drink harder from paper straws.
This spending decision should be considered but how to do that? Should we look at what AUT actually produced and what it spent? Or, should we create some robot models of van der Geest and his supervisor? Situate them in a playhouse-lab and try to simulate how they arrive at scientific results? Judge the real life economics according to the model rather than what they really did. You’d never do that in accouting but it’s good enough for biology to not study their actual subject matter.
Yikes. Maybe this is how Government’s Science for Technological Innovation desides to thow out our cash? Maybe they have a Playmobile van der Geest in a dollhouse somewhere in Wellington and he’s performing well so that’s how they know to allocate the funding.
Posted yesterday about how the Government’s Department of Conservation are blowing time and money trying to kill rats on Miramar Peninsula. Tom Scott (the English science presenter, not the Kiwi artist) was fairly agog at the impossible waste of time. But imagine they didn’t even try to kill real rats just robot rats of their own creation in the lab? In science we need to test reality not our own models of reality or else we’re just studying shapes of ourselves in the mirrors we made.
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