This writer seems to be missing the point. The point was not what HitchBOT was. By creating HitchBOT, its makers invited the world to play pretend with them: to pretend (for entertainment purposes!) that HitchBOT was a whimsical hitchhiker in need of aid, and to collectively see how far the participants in this game could get it. Destroying HitchBOT selfishly ended the game for everyone else.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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If Hillary were president HitchBot would still be alive
E: followup, from wikipedia:
Smith and Zeller recreated their invention as hitchBOT 2.0 in 2019. The robot was sent to Paris, France, where it was touring about and appearing in a play, Killing Robots, by Linda Blanchet. That tour was put on hold indefinitely due to COVID-19.
As a metaphor for liberal fantasy and optimism, hitchbot was doomed to die, one way or another.
This commenter seems to be missing the point about the point.
It's true, I don't get it.
I'm also still waiting for an explanation. I thought asking nicely would net an explanation, but I only got a snarky response. I feel like I'm in the wrong place if I genuinely want to understand it
you have 16 posts on Lemmy and most of them are you Genuinely Curiously JAQing off about shit you already damn well knew before going into the thread so lol no nobody owes you a fucking explanation
I'm sorry, I'm afraid it also flies over my head. Can you explain it to me? Is it sarcasm I failed to pick up?
no
❤️
go birds
🦅
you know I fucking hate the classism implicit in the common telling of the hitchbot story
“wow! this robot made it just fine through the richer parts of Europe and Canada but the instant it touched Philadelphia they tore it apart!” good. they had better things to do than engage in your weird fucking roleplay.
Philly, where robots go to die
I know more than one robotics company that has been sent to a bitter death at the hands of the Schuylkill
Really, the clue was right there in the name all along.
It is a city that looked at Gritty with deep skepticism until they realized how much everyone else hated him, at which point he was elected mayor for life I think? Iconic.
I have some stale notes on the AI Hacking chapters of Schneier's "A Hacker's Mind", and in one of those chapters he theorizes how AI might hack human emotions. He brings humanoid robots with cute faces as an example.
You know, I think I have an idea how a social countermeasure to that might look like.
I saw a real stupid post (reposted on the sneersub, I think) about how all the people wanting OpenAI to reinstate o4 after GPT5 was released were soldiers converted by o4, and that o4 had achieved the superpersuasiveness that Yud froths over. Good to know that a pair of googly eyes probably has the same level of persuasiveness.
Reminds me of the Grock calling itself mecha Hitler like 3 days before it was put into the body of a clingy anime AI girlfriend that is marketed to teenage boys.
Providing a cathartic release for some pissed-off Eagles fan is the closest it has ever come to usefulness.
They should have covered hitchbot in grease.
The grease just encourages them to try harder
What Canadian hockey teams are getting the shit beat out of them by our teams? Toronto is tearing it up rn. So is Winnipeg.
This was written in 2015.
Counterpoint: what if HitchBOT was the start of machine consciousness and now our minds will be condemned to mind-torture jail forever. Perhaps it is safer to start a new religion that worships HitchBOT.
Only noticed it when I realized I had not closed the tab, but there are several comment under that article telling the author to kill himself. Over a dumb art project.
To give some slack to HitchBOT, the design at least had some personality to it. That is a lot more than you can give the average tech-related thing these days, especially in an age of AI slop.
If there is no point to being cute with the stupid assemblage of trash then what is gained for beating the stupid assemblage of trash? Ape-man catharsis? The jackasses did it because they were in on the game of anthropomorphizing an assemblage of trash too, and breaking it was probably at least as much fun as taking the assemblage of trash out hitchhiking. But what those local yocals showed the world about their casually cruel jocularity was that in Europe and Canada, you can play makebelieve with the assemblage of trash, but in America, the assemblage of trash is an outsider not conforming to the status quo but still requiring a modicum of consideration and thought to engage with, and when that kind of book readin' deep thinkin' faggit rocks up on our shores the cultural instinct is treating it like an assemblage of trash even if its a mother of three. Then celebrate our rude 'tude havin' selves and lord it over the effete Entire Rest Of The Planet.
Forgive me if I don't take lectures about cultural moments from contrarion fucking sports websites. I guess as a piece of comedy writing its enjoyable but as an actual argument it makes Americans look like filthy fucking imaginationless troglodytes. And what makes that come off worse is the celebration of that streak in us. To break toys after seeing other people playing makebelieve. To laugh at the concept of applying even rhetorical compassion to an inanimate object, as if people haven't had a rich spiritual and at times familial connection with the inanimate world for thousands of years.
I get that you posted this probably alluding to LLMs and as a Beehawfuck I know I am coming off really pissy here and I must apologize. Its not that I don't appreciate the joke or have wholly missed the punchline. If an eightball loaded with GPT were inserted into my life asking for hitchhiking, I would punt it into somebody else's fucking lightcone. But this stupid trashcan hitchhiker thing wasn't selling the idea of replacing the people closest to me or their knowledge bases. It was the rare sort of toy adults around the world had the opportunity to play with. And as much as I enjoy the comedy writing, reading this fart sniffer sports blogger dissing all but a particular subset of crude Ugly American-stereotype assholes, with the soft-jingo touch suggesting Canadians are basically morons that Americans babysit (which as an attitude looks PARTICULARLY evil and chauvanistic of late), I kinda had to speak up.
Edit: I let the bad day I'm having affect this comment. I don't believe in deleting comments unless its something I feel reflects a whole different me that isn't me anymore, and I've got nothing like that on Fediverse. I stand by my thoughts and feelings here but they were expressed perhaps with a bit much vitriol. Please excuse me. I have no real enmity to the OP here.
well duh if you break down an analogy it breaks down dawg.
I think dgerard has hit upon a microcosm with this post. I’ve half joked about it elsewhere but this project of collective fun and whimsy and its fate is a crystallization of the life of liberal optimism from early 2015 onward. Hillary was predicted to win, Marvel movies hadn’t majorly fallen out of favor yet, and most people weren’t hip to the tech industry being the sociopathic behemoth that it always has been. But then, as we know, all that rosy-cute whimsy was shot to shreds like a Cincinnati gorilla.
Look where we are today. Canada and Europe are also facing the rising tide of fascism. Western governments are still by and large facilitating a genocide through Israel. That the author, probably not some scholar of geopolitics, had the wisdom in 2015 that liberal optimism was a pile of garbage should be lauded.
I still remember the outcry when Harambe was shot. Shit truly does feel like the point where everything began turning to shit.
Someone I know argued that Harambe's death led to Trump's election, and its been burned into my mind ever since:
dicks out for harambe
Unironically, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk (and IIRC Kanye West) used the death of Harambe to spread conspiracy theories. They use a playbook designed by Steve Bannon:
- Y'know, this awful thing happened
- The people in charge didn't handle it well
- There's a reason for this: conspiracy
- You know who is behind this? It's Ethnic Outgroup! They are the true villains, that Ethnic Outgroup, they're behind the conspiracy
- I want you to get up, go to the window, and yell "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore"
I understand that the ~Vibe of this thing wandering around and then getting knocked over in America was on point but I'm not sure I can connect the defacement of a little trashcan with some broad rejection of the liberal status quo. If I have to make one clear connection between now and then its that we're talking about a culture that delighted in breaking this stupid thing that wasn't hurting anybody, and then that culture elected Trump. I doubt much thought was put into it, rather the opposite of thought. "I've seen the little attention getting robot on social media and I'm going to break it now to put an end to what I see as frivolous decadence, then let smarter people come up with a post-hoc justification about why this Had To Happen that makes our personal trauma and impulses toward sociopathy into a linearly constructed causative sequence that justifies the occurance."
I also had this exact feeling about 'the world falling apart and how everyone who likes X thing are stupid sheeple', but X thing was the musical genre diminuitively referred to now as Stomp Clap Hey music. Hated the shit during its heyday. It symbolized elder millenials burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the general shit situation of the planet to reread Harry Potter books and call Trump a poo head on websites. To me it seemed to appeal to people who were formerly "free spirits" and "deep thinkers" who were reaching their mid-30s and finally able to advance in their careers and afford homes, so they were beginning to feel like their upbringings during thr financial crisis were just bad dreams. If it had been within my ability to crush "Stomp Clap Hey" music and kill the collective enjoyment of it I would have. But I realized it was just... fucking... music... I could ignore it. And whether or not it meant all those things I felt it did, ruining it for other people would have been wrong. So I stopped badmouthing it and now we call it Stomp Clap Hey and the thinkers who give a shit are thinkering over that I guess.
but I’m not sure I can connect the defacement of a little trashcan with some broad rejection of the liberal status quo.
Well, it’s a metaphor, you see. It’s a comparison, not a direct connection.
we’re talking about a culture that delighted in breaking this stupid thing that wasn’t hurting anybody, and then that culture elected Trump.
Well, that’s just a very first order way of looking at it. I’m not saying “the US is filled with meanies, it killed a robot, of course it elected Trump!”, I’m saying: “Hitchbot was shattered and a collective fantasy was ended. This mirrors how Trump was elected, which shattered liberal fantasies about the US, the west, and the state of politics around the world in general.”
Yes, it’s funny that this happened in the US, and even funnier that it was in Philly. That has nothing to do with the metaphor. Hitchbot could have died anywhere, people would have mourned it, and it would still be an appropriate analogy. Try process that 🙂
But I realized it was just… fucking… music… I could ignore it
I feel another microcosm brewing…
this is a garbage can with telemetry
all of the technology that came after it is also a garbage can with telemetry
this comment has a rancid attitude no matter how much civility filler you try to spackle on top
I've gotten fond of my own voice lately, which usually ends up with me lurking for a few months. I stand by my sentiment but clearly I had a bug up my ass. Thanks for keeping it real.