Oh look. Boston Dynamics — of future robot apocalypse fame — have made another mechanical dog. And this one can go inside houses. Great.
The first time I saw the above gif (via Super Punch), I laughed, not at the “animal cruelty”, but mostly because I could imagine this guy’s business card actually saying “robot dog kicker”.
But then you watch it over, and over, and over. And even after the “animal cruelty” angle has come and gone, which makes you uneasy as it is, you start to imagine what happens after the gif cuts off. Like, this spindly robot dog, able to correct its balance in such a fast and natural way, decides “f**k this”, and launches itself at the guy, tearing him apart.
Of course, as you can see in the full video below, that’s not what happens.
Yet.
The dog is called “Spot”, and is designed to operate both indoors and outdoors, even over “rough terrain”. And, in all seriousness, it looks super-impressive. For every time we laugh at an expensive robot falling over, there’s something like this that reminds us just how sci-fi our contemporary existence really is.
Comments
8 responses to “Hey, Maybe Don’t Kick That Robot Dog”
Those things really give me the willies.
Just because the robot dog can’t speak, or see, or feel, or have a constructive thought process… Doesn’t mean it doesn’t have RIGHTS!!!
Lookit the little metal gear cuties, aww.
can’t wait for the robot horse racing to begin
Every kick.
Every laugh.
It remembers.
It waits.
Unless it runs on Microsoft software and does its equivalent of the blue screen of death.
The machine abuse begins already. Have none of these fools seen Terminator? The Matrix? My Little Toaster?
I think I said this when they came out with the original one – but I’ll say it again in view of the GIF above (especially now this new one isn’t ‘tethered’) – it’s the frikkin’ ‘mechanical hound’ from Fahrenheit 451 people ! Looks almost exactly how I imagined it would look too (minus the killing-narcotic carrying needle probe obviously) when I read the novel !
How long before homeland security (and soon thereafter our very own beloved AFP / ASIO spooks) start deploying these things to track down ‘undesirables’ like wannabe ‘terrorists’, drug dealers and … people who pirate Game of Thrones !