RIP hitchBOT: When Philly Murdered a Goofy Traveling Robot

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5QkcKwvShL0

Once upon a time, there was a robot who embodied the spirit of exploration and who pursued a deeper understanding of humanity through love and connection, and served as a really cool social experiment to showcase that connection. And then someone in Philadelphia murdered and dismembered him. People, am I right? Let’s dive into the story of hitchBOT and see what we can uncover about his extraordinary journey. But mostly we’ll talk about the dismembering. Sorry, buddy.

I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the day that robots are definitely not taking over the world. If running into one dude in Philly is all it takes, we’re fine.

This one’s been making the rounds on social media again so I figured it would be a good idea to do a deep dive and get the whole story. Because memes are not enough. Repeat after me--memes are never enough. So let’s get the full context surrounding murderbot, I mean hitchBOT, and find out exactly what happened to the poor fellow before we come to any conclusions.

Initially created in 2013, hitchBOT was the brainchild of Professor David Harris Smith from McMaster University and Professor Frauke Zeller who was at Ryerson then and at the University of Edinburgh now.

hitchBOT was a vaguely human-like pile of garbage, basically. Smith and Zeller described it as “yard sale chic.” hitchBOT had rubber gloves for hands, pool noodles for limbs, and its body was made from a plastic bucket. Its head was a transparent container meant to hold cake with an LED screen inside. It sported a digitized retro face with eyes that could blink and a smile that would look right at home in Fallout 3.

It was humanoid in its presentation, and it was small, and silly, and about the size of a child around the age of six. All these design decisions were intentional, giving hitchBOT a friendly and helpless, if not goofy, sort of look, in order to engender sympathy and encourage people to want to throw it in their back seat.

hitchBOT couldn’t move on its own, so it was very much dependent on passersby to actually stop, get out of their car, investigate this weird thing on the road, figure out what the heck they were looking at through a combination of notes and verbal cues, and then somehow decide, “yeah, I’m not doing anything right now, let’s get you on your way, little guy.” hitchBOT conveniently came attached to a car seat, so someone could toss him in their car and plug him into their cigarette lighter to keep the robot’s battery running while they rode on into the sunset together.

Smith and Zeller created hitchBOT with the stated goal of finding out if “robots could trust people.” Now, I can’t say with absolute certainty, but from where I’m sitting, this whole informal experiment seems to have been a fun commentary on what human beings might do when left to their own devices in relative anonymity, and a novel method of discovering whether or not one can truly rely on the kindness of strangers. Let’s find out if I’m right.

It does seem like, for the most part, hitchBOT’s journey went off without a….hitch. In the summer of 2014, he went on his first cross-country trip in his homeland of Canada. The traveling robot hitchhiked all the way from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia. I’d probably be impressed if I could tell you where those places were, but to my American ears they just sound like elf villages. Where’s Gandalf? Did he give hitchBOT a ride through the mines of Moria? Why didn’t they just use the dang eagles to get him there?

hitchBOT made the Canadian journey in just under a month. It was picked up and carried along on 19 different rides. To make the trip more fun for the humans involved, hitchBOT was programmed with some weird stupid humor, but no dad jokes, unfortunately, and the entire contents of Wikipedia had been uploaded into its robot brain. So it could talk about pretty much anything, though its conversational skills were super limited and very one-sided because you were just listening to factoids as the miles ticked by, or kilometers, I guess in this case. Mercifully, you could tell hitchBOT to be quiet, or if you were feeling charitable, you could use the phrase “take a nap,” and the robot would stop pelting you with questions or facts about the 1906 World Series (it was the only one where both teams were from Chicago).

hitchBOT went super viral online. It had accounts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and it would regularly take pictures along its journey. There was also a website where you could follow its progress and keep tabs on its socials, and even follow the robot’s exact location with GPS, which got really annoying sometimes when people brought it home for the night and their house was swarmed by hitchBOT’s adoring fans. So sometimes the GPS had to be turned off to maintain privacy.

Of course, the imaginations of the strangers who got their hands on him went wild, and they snapped their own pictures of the robot to post online, too. Some of the places and scenarios hitchBOT ended up in included a wedding, where he danced on the bride’s shoulders, a First Nation’s powwow, where he was the honored guest, and a camping trip, where he was pictured using a camper toilet. I mean, I get it, even if your insides are literally made of metal, all that fry bread is going to have an effect.

As a fun side note, I’ve been gendering hitchBOT this whole time with he/him pronouns, but at the First Nations powwow, hitchBOT was given a name that translates to “Iron Woman.” So there’s a fun examination that could be done about anthropomorphizing robots and even assigning them a gender when they basically just look like cartoonish garbage.

A second hitchBOT was assembled in February of 2015, and this time it was sent around Germany for ten days. After that, it spent a few weeks in the Netherlands.

But then, following a grave error in judgment, Smith and Zeller set hitchBOT’s robot eyes on an American journey. And so, like Fievel before her, hitchBOT set off to go west. Her -- hitchBOT is a her. Or is it? Again, just one group of people called it that, so what do other people think? And does it even matter? These are some of the exact questions the team behind hitchBOT was looking to answer.

But they didn’t get the chance, because just two weeks after starting out from Boston on a planned cross-country trip to San Francisco, hitchBOT was violently murdered in Philadelphia.

The team received an image of hitchBOT sprawled haphazardly on the ground with its limbs detached and its decapitated head nowhere to be found. hitchBOT was violently beaten by an unknown assailant and then torn apart. The robot was harvested for parts, including the transparent cake bowl head and LED screen face, along with all the wires that made up its humanlike circulatory system.

You may be thinking, but hitchBOT took pictures everywhere it went, so why doesn’t it have a picture of the shitheel who wrecked all of our fun and shattered our hopes and dreams of living vicariously through the social media feeds of a traveling robot? Well, the camera went off every twenty minutes, so the attack must have taken place in the time between when one shot was taken and the next one, which never came.

The corpse of hitchBOT was found when fans of the robot hunted it down using its last known GPS location via the tracker on the website. They attempted to help in whatever way they could, but Smith and Zeller knew right away there was nothing to be done. The robot’s creators went into the experiment with the full knowledge that something like this might happen, which is another reason for hitchBOT’s cheaply made “yard sale chic” appearance. It was cost-effective, especially in the case of a run-in with a Streets of Rage cosplayer in a Philadelphia alleyway.

As for Smith and Zeller, they maintain that we shouldn’t blame the city of brotherly love. Zeller told the Guardian that, “I really believe this could have happened anywhere. Robots can trust humans but there’s always some people anywhere that might have issues for any reason. I really want to emphasize I don’t think it has anything to do with the States nor with Philadelphia.” You tell that to hitchBOT’s cute little bucket list that it only got to check off two items on. Look at this thing, it’s adorable. You have listening to jazz music in New Orleans, seeing the geysers in Yellowstone, this “be the fifth portrait on Mount Rushmore,” and then a somewhat inexplicable “Vegas!” that I don’t even want to speculate on. Can robots get scabies?

Listen, this is America we’re talking about. We don’t take kindly to strangers of any stripes, especially the corrugated aluminum and transparent tupperware dessert container variety, unless it has actual dessert in it, and lots of it, obesity-inducing amounts of it, and not a cutesy blinking LED eyeball face that’s telling us facts we just don’t want to hear. Americans aren’t interested in facts. If hitchBOT was yelling about illegal immigrants taking our jobs or how vaccines and 5g are making bald eagles cry, then maybe we would have listened.

hitchBOT successfully hitchhiked across three other countries, relying solely on the kindness of the citizens there to physically care for it and see it along on its way, but damn near as soon as it set foot in America it was quite literally torn apart. Maybe we just party too hard for polite Canadian robots. Maybe hitchBOT just couldn’t handle our American way of life. Just so much freedom. If hitchBOT came with a minifridge full of Coors Light, then maybe it would have made it all the way to San Francisco.

Now, one of the most insane consequences of the death of hitchBOT was that the Pope was visiting Philadelphia soon after the robot met its end, and a local Philadelphia radio station constructed an imitation Pope Bot to travel around the Deleware Valley and prove to the Pope that it really was a safe area. Fortunately for the Vatican, Pope Bot was a success and did not die. Though you’d think if it had, it would have risen three days later and we’d have a whole new robot Jesus to contend with.

The original hitchBOT is on display at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. You can go see it there and pay homage to one of the strangest social experiments involving human interaction with technology.

For more on hitchBOT’s intended purpose, its creators have done interviews and written opinion pieces, some of which I’ve linked down in the digeridoo. But in a piece for the Harvard Business Review, Smith and Zeller discuss the idea of robots in the workplace, and the fact that people might have to collaborate with non-human colleagues at some point in the near future. Of course, this was years before the AI boom took hold, and physical robots were substituted for large language models as the predominant automation tool looking to replace human labor. So we might not get to find out what happens when your coworker Linda is replaced with a T-1000.

Though Smith and Zeller were most interested in finding out what kinds of responses people would have when confronted with the strange, helpless robot. In the HBR article, they say that, “The robot could not move by itself, so people who picked up hitchBOT had to carry it to the car, lift it inside, put the safety belt on, and plug its power cord into the cigarette lighter. This design reversed the notion of robots as constructed to help us, and instead created a robot that would address people’s curiosity and willingness to engage with technology.”

Basically, they made a weird robot baby and watched to find out whether or not people would be willing to care about it. And lots of people did. Because we do things automatically like anthropomorphize and assign genders to our technology. Simple things from the way we name our cars to assigning personalities to the shitty copy machine at work, to testing ChatGPT to see whether it really does want to try and launch the nukes when we’re not looking.

One of the most illuminating social experiments that documents this phenomenon comes to us from a 2012 workshop led by Dr. Kate Darling from MIT, where she had participants bond with cute, lifelike, wriggling and squeaking dinosaur robots only to turn around and demand that participants torture and murder them. They all unanimously refused until Darling threatened to destroy the adorable things herself, and one man finally volunteered to sacrifice his robot to save the rest, and they all had a touching moment of silence afterward. Darling led a more formal experiment in 2015 with similar results.

So what can we take away from any of this? Research tells us there’s a connection between empathy and abuse or violence. We know this through studies on human interaction with animals, and the empathy we feel for our furry friends. A 2019 study from Yon Soo Park and Benjamin Valentino showed us that those who felt the most empathy for animals also held passionate views about equality and compassion for their fellow humans. And now we’re learning that the same sort of information can be gained through watching human interaction with lifelike robots. So, it’s possible to discover someone’s tendency toward antisocial personality traits through the way they treat a robot.

Here’s a fun thought though--what if we just treated each other as well as some people treat toy dinosaurs? I guess not wanting to annihilate a squirming, lifelike robot is a bit of a low bar, but it’s possible that we could, over time and with some effort, raise the bar a bit to include more care and compassion for each other. hitchBOT found out why people don’t hitchhike in modern times, and not just because Uber and Lyft exist, but because a lot of us are genuinely afraid of what lurks in the hearts of the strangers we don’t know. Maybe if we worked a little harder to break down the barriers that keep us separate and anxious around each other, and simply realized that we’re all in this together and decide to have empathy for each other’s struggles, because life is genuinely hard for everyone, then maybe we might learn to be as kind to strangers as most strangers were to a goofy traveling robot.

Let’s be good to each other from now on, the ghost of hitchBOT is watching.