I’ve enjoyed Mark Rober’s videos for a while now. They are fun, touch on accessible topics, and have decent production value. But this recent video isn’t sitting right with me
The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrGENEXocJU
In it, he talks about a few techniques for how to take down “bad guy drones”, the problems with each, and then shows off the drone tech by Anduril as a solution.
Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
In the video, the Anduril product is a heavy drone that uses kinetic energy to destroy other drones (by flying into them). Quoting the person in the video:
imagine a children’s bowling ball thrown at twice as fast as a major league baseball fastball, that’s what it’s like getting hit by Anvil
This technology is scary for obvious reasons, especially in the wrong hands. What I also don’t like is how Mark Rober’s content is aimed at children, and this video includes a large segment advertising the children’s products he is selling. Despite that, he is promoting military technology with serious ethical implications.
There’s even a section in the video where they show off the Roadrunner, compare it against the patriot missiles, and loosely tie it in to defending against drones. While the Anvil could be used to hurt people, at least it is designed for small flying drones. The Roadrunner is not:
The Roadrunner is a 6 ft (1.8 m)-long twin turbojet-powered delta-winged craft capable of high subsonic speeds and extreme maneuverability. Company officials describe it as somewhere between an autonomous drone and a reusable missile. The basic version can be fitted with modular payloads such as intelligence and reconnaissance sensors. The Roadrunner-M has an explosive warhead to intercept UAS, cruise missiles, and manned aircraft.
I also had this uneasy feeling watching the video. It certainly felt a bit like a cog in the military industrial machine. While the actual content of the video wasn’t exactly bad in my opinion, I don’t know how I feel about pitching anti-terror or war machines to children through the lens of, “Engineering is cool!” That said, there are many more examples of that pitch out in the world in other forms. I do think Mark could be more careful especially when he is directly promoting a company in the defense industry.
Unfortunately engineering and military have a huge overlap in the US. It’s kind of inescapable. I found out recently that Destin from Smarter Every Day also worked for a weapons manufacturer before starting YouTube. These people just don’t want to think about the fact that they probably have blood on their hands.
I don’t think Destin’s ever been real shy about his connections. Huntsville is basically nothing but NASA and missile companies, and he did a multi-part series where he lived on an active US Navy sub for two days.
There’s a difference between showing off a technological marvel like a nuclear submarine and not really focusing on its applications as a weapon, versus showing off a weapon and being like “it’s so cool to kill ‘bad guys’ with this stuff”
And yeah he probably hasn’t been shy about it, I don’t watch his videos religiously. I found out during his excellent talk on the Artemis program. IIRC, he mentioned he helped design missile countermeasures, which is pretty tame as military industrial complex goes, but it’s still participating in the amelioration of killing machines, which doesn’t sit right with me. And he talked about it so nonchalantly, like he hadn’t considered that the people at the end of the barrel of the weapons he was helping design obviously were the “bad guys”
I still have a ton of respect for the guy and his educational outreach work, and I don’t hold it against him, I just don’t get how someone could sleep at night knowing that they helped make weapons more efficient at killing people.
I am well aware of this overlap and it doesn’t come as a surprise. I perhaps wish more of these creators acknowledged the military industrial complex and addressed what it means for their content and for the world of engineering.
He worked for the military as a missile test engineer, even did an interview with a four star general. The general described the video he was making (the interview i mean) as a weapon
Damn, never saw that. At least the general was forthcoming about why they do that sort of outreach.
If you take a look into the fitness bubble on YouTube you will see military propaganda too. They’re often competing against real soldiers/SEALS/whatever to demonstrate how well prepared they’re are in the case of war. Back in the subject of engineering, William Osman was also sponsored by the Navy (I think) one time.
The US navy did a campaign a few years ago that paid a bunch of youtubers across a wide range of video genres.
Looking from outside the US, it appears pretty weird how deeply ingrained in America’s mindset the military is.
The US military spends a shitload of money to be deeply ingrained.
I don’t know how I feel about pitching anti-terror or war machines to children through the lens of, “Engineering is cool!” That said, there are many more examples of that pitch out in the world in other forms.
Kids have been sold military toys since forever. GI Joe, tin soldiers, toy guns, toy armor and swords, model kits of tanks and fighter aircraft…
Kids love to fight, adults realise there are better solutions.
The breathless enthusiasm for the military industrial complex while dropping scary descriptions of terrorism that hasn’t happened gave me exactly the same impression.
I hate this kind of content, especially from someone who seems like a pretty genuine person.
Please Mark: be a bit more critical.
Mark is not a genuine person he is a pretengineer. He can barely make a functional robot.
Backyard Scientist and Sripol however are the real deal.
If you want a real engineer, watch “stuff made here” perhaps the most competent engineer on YouTube.
If you want to watch top quality unbiased science content, there’s “smarter every day”, “veritasium” and “3blue1brown”. They’re all great, I highly recommend them all.
If you want a good combo of engineering and science, and probably the smartest person on YouTube, “the thought emporium” will blow your mind. The projects they come up with… I never knew any of that was possible.
If you want to watch top quality unbiased science content, there’s “smarter every day”, “veritasium” and “3blue1brown”. They’re all great, I highly recommend them all.
Add to that any and all of Brady Haran’s channels: Numberphile (maths), Periodic Videos (chemistry), Sixty Symbols (physics), Deep Sky Videos (astronomy)…
Didn’t the guy work on the Mars Rover at nasa though?
Probably on some design stuff. If you look at his videos he never makes anything impressive. Just some mediocre junior tier engineering with good video production.
This video is no different. Backyard Scientist shows up with a functional shockwave blaster. Mark puts some elastics on rocket shaped foam and calls it a day.
I think it’s because Mark wants to interest a young audience rather than building some very complicated stuff little kids wouldn’t be able to do.
Not necessarily. Making a great product would only attract a younger audience more and make the videos far cooler. But that takes a ton of time. Way more than just painting a large cannon and strapping some elastics to it
Mark clearly tries to only deliver a minimum viable product for a single shot rather than an actually functional product.
He falls under the “shittyrobots” engineers that don’t just make shitty robots for fun, but because they can’t actually make non shitty robots which accomplish the desired goal of their video well. Some people such as “I Did A Thing” don’t try to hide it and make it part of the content. Mark is in the twilight zone of pretending he’s engineering complex stuff while not actually doing that.
Dude was a nasa engineer. Just because he doesn’t do the complicated stuff on yt doesn’t mean he’s not capable of doing so. I do wish he did complex stuff though.
I just checked his Wikipedia page for his credentials. Worked for 9 years at NASA, of which 7 working on the Curiosity rover (yeah, the one that’s on Mars now).
I’d say that’s credentialed enough.
I too wish he did more complex stuff.
Dude was a NASA engineer. This also says more about how low the bar is for NASA engineers than about Mark, as we can clearly see Mark is incapable of good engineering.
As people above have pointed out there are plenty of real engineers making real cool stuff and get views with it. It is not necessary to make a bad robot whatsoever. Hell there’s a reason Backyard Scientist got featured on the thumbnail.
Stuff made here. Tom Stanton. Peter Sripol. Backyard Scientist, James Bruton, Collin Furze, and many more. These people make amazing videos about prototypes that are actually functional and accomplish the goals they set out.
Mark does not meet the list of people who make amazing inventions for their videos that actually work. He makes painted trash that falls apart when touched. He makes shitty robots not because he wants to, but because he can’t make good ones. If any more people need to be triggered, Micheal Reeves also doesn’t meet this list.
Integzas pretty great too, Lots of on screen trial and error and explaining thought processes.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I had a great interest in war when I was a boy. Now as an adult, I’d rather have Mark explaining things to kids than anyone else they might seek out.
Sure, and I went through the video looking for some nuanced explanation of the technology, the risks, and what safeguards were being put in place. Unfortunately, I didn’t see any, and the cheerful music throughout the video seems to be promoting the content more than anything else.
I find that there are other engineering channels that discuss technologies while focussing on the technology itself, both the good and the bad. I’m not opposed to such content being accessible to children, but the way this video goes about it did not sit right with me
If it’s military tech, then the finer details are likely not part of the public domain. Anything that could be used to understand or develop a way to counteract the weapon more effectively, or sometimes even just understand its precise capabilities, would be secret.
It’s understandable that it does not sit well, I think that’s healthy. War is hell.
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I watched it with my kids and felt uncomfortable. This sort of video is not the same as elephants toothpaste.
I don’t suffer through rober videos so my kids can now worry people want to drop bombs on them at a stadium.
Thanks mark.
That’s an absolutely awful video. Loud, obnoxious, disingenuous and not even remotely as funny, informative, comprehensive, or clever as the idiot who made it thinks it is. It’s valueless content made to be ingested and served up by an algorithm.
All of the people here saying Backyard Scientist is better should check out his latest video.
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This is a common pattern in content creators. As they grow their goals shift into running a production machine that maximizes earnings, throwing away any values or standards they started with.
Just look at LTT/LMG. It’s not gonna get better, so you could watch someone else who still values things other than money.
Weird topic for a channel aimed at children
Also a 5mn ad break to sell his kit felt much too long.
It’s like 1/3 of the video.
sponsor block would like to introduce itself
I think these are not blocked by default by sponsor block because it’s an ad for the creator’s products.
But anyway it’s far too long.
Felt like a LTT video…
Yeah, I recently learned you could enable blocking self-sponsorships too and it cut out like a third of this video.
That’s his videos now. Get you to watch them to hype Crunch Labs.
This, I think, is more a symptom of YouTube no longer supporting creators. Most every big channel is looking to alternate income sources. YouTube ad revenue and sponsor inserts aren’t good enough.
Thing is, I wouldn’t mind it if channels could self-fund by things like this, but it’s being done on top of all the ads, not replacing them.
It does seem interesting though. I was thinking of getting one for my sister but I believe the price deterred me.
Ive turned this shit off after 30s. Fucking military industrial complex propaganda. Remember, they’re gonna bomb your stadiums from drones (maybe) so forget about all other problems of our society and masturbate to our defensive abilities (that we would never ever use to kill innocent kids in the middle east).
yea, thats about how far i got. Last thing we need is more fear of something that likley wont happen…
Why have a drone drop something off, when you could bring in something much larger in a backpack
Gee, I don’t know, because you can fly a drone (or multiple drones) around security?
Such a weird take, I just watched a program about education resources, was that bad because they didn’t also cover all other problems our society faces?
I think it’s more the dual-use nature of defense technology. It is very realistic to assume the tech that defends you here, is also going to be used in armed conflict (which historically for the US, involves in many civilian deaths). To present the technology without that critical examination, especially to a young audience like Rober’s, is irresponsible. It can help form the view that this technology is inherently good, by leaving the adverse consequences under-examined and out of view to children watching this video.
Not that we need to suddenly start exposing kids to reporting on civilian collateral damage, wedding bombings, war crimes, etc… But if those are inherently part of this technology then leaving them out overlooks a crucial outcome of developing these tools. Maybe we just shouldn’t advertise defense tech in kids media?
I mean they’re have been drone attacks already. Like it has already killed people, with Ukrainian forces uses them and the Houthis attacks in the Red Sea.
I mean its like they are comparing SciFi tech for warfare, though some people like that too shrug
This just in: Palmer Luckey is a piece of shit. This is what you bought when you paid for the Oculus Rift.
Somehow I already knew this was Anduril.
What’s wrong with Palmer Luckey. I don’t have much research on him but I believe Oculus was better before he sold out to Facebook.
He’s a “libertarian” who loves and fundraises for Trump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries
It was founded in 2017 by inventor Palmer Luckey with investors and founders associated with Palantir and SpaceX. Anduril aims to sell the U.S. Department of Defense technology, including artificial intelligence and robotics. Anduril’s major products include unmanned aerial systems (UAS), counter-UAS (CUAS), semi-portable autonomous surveillance systems, and networked command and control software.
This was months after he left Facebook. He left in March 2017 and opened Anduril in June 2017.
Point one against him was that he sold Oculus to Facebook. Point two is that he used his earnings from Oculus/Facebook to start a military hardware company with focus on autonomous weapons.
In other words, everyone who paid money to support Oculus ended up supporting this. This is what the profits of Oculus Rift bought: violent weaponry with more concern for profit than humanity. Great job, VR gamers!
Like seriously, though. If I buy a video game console, I shouldn’t have to be concerned the profits will be used to make weapons.
While I don’t want to support weapons, blaming people that bought the vr headset in the past for what he would do with the money after the sale is a very bad take. You can’t blame them for not knowing the future.
Also the argument itself doesn’t make much sense and can be strawmaned to “you pay taxes, therefore you are a complicit in the murders of your military, therefore you are a bad person”.
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I was not expecting this amount of hate over this video when I clicked on this post. The video is… normal? I don’t see issues? This whole thread seems oddly anti-military, anti-tech, and anti-Mark Rober. Like, what, is this tech going to be used to murder children more effectively than bombing a school? Even if it is, why is Mark Rober at fault and actually a phony who’s just shelling out for fame/cash? I’m genuinely curious what I’m missing here.
I didnt hate the video when I watched it, but Mark’s videos are heavily aimed at family friendly vibes, and this video is heavily centered around domestic terrorism, even though it family friendly dances around actually using the term. Which is a weird vibe
Lemmy is slipping into a weird form of pacifism where they’re really hype about certain types of violence (punch a nazi, execute billionaires, etc) but also hate democracies working together to defend against attack because they see government as a nebulous evil and they’d rather people die than admit their edgy ideology is overly simplistic.
And yes I know the west has been involved in bad wars predicated on lies, the west isn’t the only place where people lie and do awful things for personal power and wealth, democracy isn’t perfect but it’s a work in progress best effort to work on making things better and it’s actually working pretty well really all things considered. I certainly think having tools to defend it against attack is a sensible and good thing especially something as elegant and accurate as just smashing attacking drones with percussive force. Far less likelihood of civilian casualties or ecological damage.
But the West isn’t a work in progress. We actively support genocide. We are the baddies that live on the backs of the rest of the world. We currently do this. Actively.
That’s such a simplistic and idealistic world view, you really think the rest of the world would just be a utopia of mutual love and respect if it weren’t for the existence of the evil race?
People the world over are all just human there are lovely Americans, lovely Arabs, lovely Chinese and Japanese and Ghanaian… however there are also greedy and manipulative people in all these places, people who will hurt others to get in a position of power - this is a reality of life, things are complex and sometimes interests and established beliefs clash leafing to conflict. This happens everywhere all through history.
The world is work in progress, its a lot if hugely difficult challenges many which come with added surprises and difficulties and unintended consequences.
I never said that everyone else is perfect. Don’t strawman my words.
It’s simply, propaganda. The issue with its audience is they are too young to realise they are being sold the next gen of weapons and it’s being promoted in a positive light. If you don’t understand why that is wrong then do a quick moral check in yourself.
You do realize that it’s good to give information about weapons to people who’ll be targeted by them the most?
Education in new reality of war is as important as any other.
And a sword is definitely a positive thing when many other people already have swords and you are choosing whether to have one.
What use is the information in this case?
To me it can be summed up as: Lazers can be defeated (more like we are not willing to leave our best lazer tech lying around)
Signal blocking can be defeated
So we’ve resorted to flying bricks to defeat YOUR drones, don’t even think of using them.
Oh and just remember they are presenting them in a “drone travels up” way…
But they could do the exact opposite to an “object” on the ground. (A highly deadly “penny off the empire state”)
They’ll think how to use their drones to still kill enemy’s manpower.
Are you thinking the average person is going to be buying a jet drone cannon?
Average person isn’t going to do anything comprehensively.
Maybe, but defense tech is cool.
Tru dat
defense tech is cool
“Defense” is mostly doublespeak since this tech will be used to attack and murder brown people in the other side of the world
The vortex cannon was shot directly at the youtubers in this video and they were fine. The attack drone is designed to take out other drones. What here is going to be used to kill humans exactly? Did you watch the video?
I wasn’t refering to the video. “Defense” tech is obviously a much larget topic than the video itself.
“this tech”, to me, implied a connection to the subject at hand.
I meant “defense tech” as “this tech”. Might not be accurate grammatically, I’m not a native English speaker
The drone hovers and goes down instead of up. A 200 mile an hour brick that if used right could go for multiple targets before failure.
I mean, yeah, you can modify most military tech to target humans.
There is no modify, only a down button, I suppose lazers are pretty effective but they are banned right? And EMP? I think I can survive that but I’m sure someone will be along to tell me I won’t.
I’ve pointed out that they are weapons and being presented in a friendly way, that’s all, why argue when you asked the question?
This kind of thing happens a lot. Something “negative” comes up about a popular person and everyone comes crawling out of the wood work about how they “knew all along” and “this person really is such a horrible person” and “on my god how could they do this?”
I’m probably going to regret the few comments I’ve made in this thread … but yeah, I really don’t think that video was that bad. It shows off how engineering can be applied to defending from possible future attacks. Maybe someone could use this offensively and “promotes the military industrial complex” but I think a bullet or a bomb is a lot more economical than “anvil” and “anvil” is something folks could potentially see in real life in civilian defense applications.
I’d personally love to see more people taking an interest and inspiration from counter weapons systems rather than the mentality of “the best defense is a good offense.” Not because I want to see more war, but because I think we’ve created some really nasty weapons and the shield and castle have long been out classed… People should be able to protect themselves.
Mostly I just hate when very obviously sponsored videos don’t declare their sponsorships. The entire first half of this like, 15 minute video is an ad, and then the rest of the content is made by like 3 other people. The thing he did was a big dart launcher. Now sure, that’s probably just for fun, it’s a scaled up version of the science kit he’s selling, it’s probably laudable that he didn’t want to show up his co-stars or whatever, but this is a video that has no content and basically no educational value. It’s trash, basically, it just has science education skin on.
Veritasium has done a similar thing a couple times, like his video on the autonomous cars. Very clearly a sponsorship, I think he only says so at the very end of the video, he totally glosses over any problems or downsides the technology has and speaks glowingly of it the whole time, paycheck please, next video, credibility is basically totally shot. I dunno, when I was a kid, magazines like popular science sold me on shit like the hyperloop. I wish they had been as forward thinking and hyped about normal trains, instead. Especially considering how many people have probably fallen for similar garbage like this due to that kind of stuff.
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Mark Rober is a practicing mormon. And that already did not sit right with me. Christian, muslim, I don’t care what religion, these people should stay away from child education programs. Keeping your faith completely private is borderline acceptable, but please keep your symbols of faith out of your videos (white shirt for the mormons as I learned)
This reads as borderline schizoposting
Keeping your faith completely private is borderline acceptable, but please keep your symbols of faith out of your videos
Someone just being religious is “borderline acceptable?” Please go outside. People are often religious. It doesn’t necessarily make them bad people. “Keep your symbols of faith out of your videos?” What a thing to say to a religious person who isn’t trying to convert anyone with said videos. Like, I’m not Christian, I’m no fan of their bible, but I’m not about to give SmarterEveryDay a dislike and a block because he puts a bible verse at the end of each video.
Someone just being religious is “borderline acceptable?” In educational Youtube videos, yes.
but I’m not about to give SmarterEveryDay a dislike and a block because he puts a bible verse at the end of each video. Maybe give him a dislike and a block because he gave Jared and Ivanka a platform?
I don’t take issue with personal beliefs, but religion is organized belief, telling people what and how to believe. Anyone who advocates for religion has no business in any education system whatsoever.
He’s not even in an education system he made a video on YouTube, but still you’ve got to recognize ‘ban all Christians from any form of education system’ is utterly wild?
- he’s making educational videos on Youtube, with a wide audience. You don’t have to be a teacher to be part of an education system
- fuck your strawman bullshit, learn to argue, here’s what I wrote:
Christian, muslim, I don’t care what religion, these people should stay away from child education programs. Keeping your faith completely private is borderline acceptable, but please keep your symbols of faith out of your videos (white shirt for the mormons as I learned)
“Ban all Christians from any form of education system” seems like a fairly accurate summary of “Christian, muslim, I don’t care what religion, these people should stay away from child education programs.”
Like, I guess we could give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don’t want them banned, you just want them to voluntarily never educate children in any way, and that’s… Still utterly wild
No?
There are crazies in every religion, and even agnostics and atheists have their fair share of crazies that go too far. It’s also not a great idea to just not expose kids to religious folk (even if that was conceivable, which it’s not given how many people are religious) and it’s not a great idea to demand they keep it private. Preaching is too far, but it’s perfectly acceptable for a teacher to tell their students what the teacher believes in and to wear iconography like a necklace of Jesus on the cross. In fact, I would much rather they be extremely public about what they believe in rather than be silent about it.
I hope for your personal consistency that you then are also okay with a woman in a hijab creating educational videos for youtube.
As far as the crazy atheists go, there’s a type of “atheists” that treat atheism as a belief system, but have neither tried nor have the intellectual capacity to come up with their own, original understanding of why there is no god. However, there is a fundamental difference: Every crazy atheist is on their own, there’s no “atheist institution” that backs their craziness. For cults (and the only practical distinction between a religion and a cult is just the amount of followers), that’s not the case - you have a power hierarchy, sometimes more, sometimes less flat, that advocates their belief system.
It is therefore okay for a teacher - when asked(!) about it - to tell children about their personal beliefs. It is absolutely not okay for a teacher to tell unasked, or to tell children about the belief system / cult they are a part of.
I hope for your personal consistency that you then are also okay with a woman in a hijab creating educational videos for youtube.
Yeah. That’s exactly what I was saying. You are correct, I am completely okay with that.
It is absolutely not okay for a teacher to tell unasked, or to tell children about the belief system / cult they are a part of.
I disagree. It’s perfectly fine for someone to give a sort of disclaimer as to what they believe in and other things like that. The issue is when they start preaching what they believe in without warning while supposedly teaching a different subject.
Yeah I just watched it and it seemed off. Almost like the mrwhosetheboss touring a fucking prison a while back.
I had to stop watching his videos because I can’t stand his overly enthusiastic personality.
Yeah I also definitely stopped paying much attention to him. He just seems so over enthusiastic about everything and some of his videos are quite bad
Even his voice is so fucking annoying he’s got that youtube shorts tone down to a tee and it physically repulses me.
Almost like the mrwhosetheboss touring a fucking prison a while back.
The channel Boy Boy (I Did A Thing’s
brotherfriend) did a great response video to that one.Small correction: Boy Boy is Aleksa (I Did A Thing’s friend) and Alex (I Did A Thing), not his brother
I follow both and i am still not clear who’s gay, who is the 2nd boy, if they are married or not, for real or for other reasons.
Can you tell me which one is A Thing though?
Brother? Are you sure about that?
I always assumed they were brothers, idk why
They look nothing alike. Also Aleksa or at least his family is from the Balkans.
I’m sure it’s been implied by some joke they’ve made in one of their videos, but yeah fair enough that they look nothing alike.
He talks serbo-croatian to his grandpa and I also believe he mentions running from the balkans when he was a couple years old. Might have been in the north korea video
I know he mentioned being from the Balkans in the video where he interviews the American gun nut.
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Yeah that is how I know about this. I never watched the original video because I am not interested in prisons.
I also was not happy about the video.
