10 ms·

If you watch this and your imagination doesn't run in the direction of evil robot army.. well, your imaginations doesn't work the same way as mine does. I see

by netcan 12y ago

If you watch this and your imagination doesn't run in the direction of evil robot army.. well, your imaginations doesn't work the same way as mine does. I see a drone fleet of 100 bulky trucks galloping along contested highways towards a city boiling over with the violence of several simultaneous wars. They're protected by speed and dozens of armed UAVs. 96 make it through. Acceptable losses. The first truck to unload its four legged robotic soldiers loses 30 units to the welcome party, a quarter. By the time the tenth one is unloading, they're not losing any. The last robo-dog is unloaded just 18 minutes after the first truck arrives. By that time, there are over 10,000 dogs in squad-packs seeking targets from a database of 7,000 known enemy combatants and seeking control of strategically important sites. there's something uncanny and creepy about how robots move once they've been riddled with armor piercing rounds. A leg stops working or a sensor gets damaged and it's impossible not to imagine that it's an injured animal in excruciating pain. The single minded resolve thug, that's all machine. If you're shooting off legs, you need to shoot off all four before these things will stop. Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy?

kmfrk 12y ago
They won't stalk you, if you check the opt-out field.
- zachrose 12y ago
  Though of course it will be an opt-in field that's pre-checked and surrounded by opaque verbiage.
joubert 12y ago
Google owns Boston Dynamics
- izak30 12y ago
  Not that I'm on the dystopian future train, but "Don't be Evil" isn't a Google policy.
  - Thrymr 12y ago
    Yes, it is: http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html
tootie 12y ago
Look at it another way. People involved in deadly combat have a kill or be killed mentality. Extreme caution for personal risk means you have to shoot first and ask questions later in a war zone. Not so for robots. Send them in to take prisoners. If they are destroyed, build another. Charge them until the enemy runs out of bullets. Send them close enough to use non-lethal rounds or wound legs and move on. And forget about looting and rape. Forget about collateral damage caused by bombing city blocks from the sky and hoping most inhabitants are bad. Imagine if we could shut down ISIS with $500M worth of material and no lives lost.
- acadien 12y ago
  The other possibility is the irresponsible over use as with drones. If they aren't too expensive you could just strap a bomb on one of these and run it towards any possible threat. I agree with your assessment and look forward to the onset of more nonlethal warfare. I'm just saying the opposite effect is also possible.
  - icehawk219 12y ago
    We already have irresponsible over use of drones and so far all we have are ones that can fly around and drop bombs on people. And the government goes to great lengths to make sure people are totally emotionally uninvolved in the decision and execution. Once these end up in the military it'll only be a short while before they also end up on our police force. You think the cops are bad now? Wait until they've got a small army of drones to do their bidding. It's entirely possible that that never comes to pass but the US' current direction doesn't instil a ton of confidence.
    - fargolime 12y ago
      Nor does the US' past direction. Since the 1950s it has toppled two democracies and thwarted another. The (final) overthrow of its own democracy may become possible through such technology.
    - tootie 12y ago
      "You think the cops are bad now?" I don't really. And the same benefits would apply. When cops stormed the room of Amadou Diallou and thought they saw a gun, their only option was shoot to kill. Send in a robot, and now you don't care.
btbuildem 12y ago
Yeah, there should be an equal amount of parallel effort put into developing technologies that would allow us to destroy these machines and permanently disable their subsystems. Today, politicians still have to convince people to commit industrialized murder - tomorrow, the robots will obey orders without delay.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
pjc50 12y ago
database of 7,000 known enemy combatants The database is a more worrying prospect than the robots, in a lot of ways. Who gets to designate "known" and "enemy"? What if it's the Tinder eigenfaces program? Automatable ethnic cleansing? Then what of the occupation? Robots aren't great for political legitimacy. Do you have them return fire on the kids throwing rocks at them? Unlike human guards I suppose they can sustain IED losses forever. But they're an A1 prime target for hackers...
- yellowapple 12y ago
  > What if it's the Tinder eigenfaces program? On the other hand, dispatching BigDogs and Spots to go on dates as proxies would be an interesting prospect.
snissn 12y ago
http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...
- lkbm 12y ago
  I'm generally not a fan of Newsweek, but now I definitely want to read that book. Thanks for posting this.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
That is a compelling visual. Another one might be that the truck drops off its dogs carrying first aid supplies and disperse though out the city looking for victims of some disaster. Human instinct is to go with threat first, friend later, I expect that served us well during our cave years. Humans have had a standoff attack capability for a while, and yet the number of deaths due to "war" has been going down for a while.(I'll admit that I'm not sure what to call the ISIL thing.) So where does that leave us? In a place where managing outbreaks with the lowest possible loss of life to non-combatants. And if you believe the narrative that the police are shooting people because they 'fear for officer safety' then you can certainly make the argument that an officer that is on site in a teleoperated way has no personal risk and should therefore not shoot anyone or anything except to save the life or lives of innocent civilians. But we all know that is impractical in a non-war situation.
- angersock 12y ago
  Still, the problem with having occupation-style technology and drones is that it further spreads the power of those with capital at the expense of those without. The current class setup prevents truly depraved and evil systemic evil (beyond a point) from occurring, because officers and soldiers are human and will blatantly refuse to do things that are Evil (perpetually). There is no such guarantee with drones--in fact, to refuse orders is a design flaw. I can't help but imagine some descendant of these things, in the mode of one of Bradbury's mechanical dogs, attacks a throng of protestors.
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    I do not disagree, my hope is that, as with other technologies, especially dual use ones, we will be able to keep them biased toward the positive uses. Robotics, like genetic engineering, nano-technology, and data mining can do good things and bad things. It is important to focus on the good things, remain cognizant of the bad things, and maximize the value. I would be sad to see robotic quadrapeds "banned for civilian use" because they can be weaponized, because they can also get to people in need in dangerous and hard to reach places. In a more current events sort of way, I am in favor of severe punishments for people who weaponize drones and fly them in public places, or people who manufacture and sell such drones, but I am not in favor of banning personal ownership of drones. I am willing to risk that someone will show up where I am with such a device, and the risks to my personal safety if they employ it in a deadly way, in exchange for the freedom to own and experiment with drones in a responsible way.
jimmytucson 12y ago
> Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy? Actually, Boston Dynamics is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc.
legohead 12y ago
Someone sets off a large EMP and all the dogs suddenly freeze, and fall over.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Or the dogs are encased in a rectifying antennas and they say "yumm! recharge time!" The whole point of weaponizing something is to make it resistant to the more obvious attack strategies :-).
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  ...and the next version gets an extra $5 of shielding per dog* and so is made completely immune to even a H-bomb EMP. * at a $5000 markup, but who's counting?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jobu 12y ago
It is creepy as hell to watch them walk, and that makes me wonder what groups like ISIL would think about being hunted by a small pack of them. Right now dropping bombs on houses kills some terrorists, but the collateral damage has a side-effect of bringing more to their cause. Would attack robots scare the shit out of them and make them stop, or just backfire and end up as another recruiting tool for fundamentalists?
riggins 12y ago
Just reading Bing West's A Million Steps, so that obviously is affecting me, but the first thing I thought was this would be great for saving soldiers from getting blown up by IEDs.
notatoad 12y ago
yeah, i've always kind of scoffed at the people saying boston dynamics robots are scary. They're an amazing technical accomplishment and they make me really excited and happy to see them. but as soon as i saw that shot of two robot dogs side-by-side, moving in almost synchronicity, something turned in the pit of my stomach. There's something very dystopian sci-fi about that image.
rasz_pl 12y ago
'don't be evil to me, or else'
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
Since WWI / WWII, the fate of wars has been decided by the size and complexity of industrial output, instead of the strength and bravery of men. This is just goes further in the same direction.
- adventured 12y ago
  Other than industrial output, politics is still (and will always be) one of the largest determining factors. Politics can take a vastly superior force and render their outcomes impotent on a battlefield.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
Florin_Andrei 12y ago
I don't know if this is such a huge game changer for war. I mean, we had wheels for solid ground, and machines that can fly through the air, and boats for water, and hovercrafts for ambiguous terrain. These cute dogs are ultimately not that revolutionary. I am much, much more worried about evil applications of multirotor drones. Anyway, all of the above is an exercise in futility without decent AI. The robot dogs can run - so what? As long as they're pretty dumb they can't do much damage. Now, an AI running a dog chassis, or flying a quadcopter, that's an "interesting" thought.
- bitwize 12y ago
  Wheels are notoriously poor at navigating rough terrain; that's why we build roads. We could build a vehicle with wheels or treads so huge it effectively flattens anything in its way, and we do -- but for some missions (support for a squad of soldiers on foot, say) it makes sense and is much cheaper to build a small legged vehicle.
  - BatFastard 12y ago
    Is it possible that these could make roads obsolete? Now that is an interesting concept.
    - bitwize 12y ago
      Probably not because wheels are VERY efficient at transport across smooth level terrain, and a wheeled vehicle is less easy to destabilize than a legged vehicle. So when deciding between wheels vs. legs, it will be the usual sort of engineering tradeoff: which one offers the greatest advantage for your application?
swamp40 12y ago
...and as the last human alive scrambles up a steep hill, with 100 robo-dogs close behind, he stops and drops to his knees as he finds himself overlooking a steep cliff, with no where left to run. "Why?", he looks up and asks the first robot, as it skids to a stop next to him. One by one, a dozen other robo-dogs surround the human. An armored plate drops open on the chest of the first robo-dog, revealing a small lcd screen. And the above YouTube video begins to play. The video stops after showing the callous human kicking Spot, the proto-ancestor of all the robo-dogs present on this hill. The kicking scene begins to repeat on the screen, like an old gif. And silently (for the robo-dogs were never given a true voice box), the leader lifts one robotic leg and with a single powerful pneumatic kick to his ribs, sends the last human alive flailing over the edge of the cliff.
- bitwize 12y ago
  "Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them. He has a little yard all to himself. It has a fence around it. He knows he can't jump over the fence. He's never actually tried to jump it, because he knows be can't. He doesn't go into the yard unless he has to. It's hot out there. He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and out of the yard. Most of the time, they are good people, and he doesn't bother them. He doesn't know why they are good people. He just knows it. Sometimes they are bad people, and he has to do bad things to them to make them go away. This is fitting and proper. Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends. The closest neighbor doggie is far away, farther than he can see. But he can hear this doggie bark sometimes, when a bad person approaches his yard. He can hear other neighbor doggies, too, a whole pack of them stretching off into the distance, in all directions. He belongs to a big pack of nice doggies. He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their yard, or even near it. The stranger doesn't hear him, but all the other doggies in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up and get ready to do bad things to that stranger if he should try to come into their yard. When a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and smells come into his mind along with the bark. He suddenly knows what that stranger looks like. What he smells like. How he sounds. Then, if that stranger should come anywhere near his yard, he will recognize him. He will help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can all be prepared to fight the stranger." --Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
scotty79 12y ago
What I'm missing in your vision is dozen of short range microdrones with needles covered in neurotoxin taking off of each of the dogs backs.
- lolpep8 12y ago
  Those would be chemical weapons. Those can't be used, because they are inhumane.
  - andybak 12y ago
    I find Churchill's words to be fascinating when read closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemical_weapons_in_Mesopotamia_in_1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemica... The wording is callous and shocking to my modern ears but - if you start with the premise that you are already in a violent conflict (I'm not addressing the issue of colonialism here - just the debate about the comparative ethics of bullets and explosives vs chemicals) then this sentence stands out: "It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas." We have some ridiculous Hollywood-fed beliefs that bullets and explosions create clean deaths and painless injuries.
  - scotty79 12y ago
    Not really. Chemical weapons are applied unselectively and have a great potential of using against civilians. I don't think many people would mind guided poison arrows. But I appreciate your irony. :-)
Jack000 12y ago
I imagine swarms of quadcopters would be better for that task. Less chance of being blocked by physical barriers and lower cost = more units. They're so cheap you wouldn't even need rounds, just pack on some explosives and self destruct when near.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
asdkl234890 12y ago
Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy? They are owned by Google now. But let's not pretend Google's don't be evil policy makes a big difference these days.
superuser2 12y ago
... for 3 minutes, until the batteries give out and they all need to be charged for 5-6 hours. (But actually, what is the battery life on these things? You still have the problem of heavier battery = more drain on battery. I wonder where the break-even point is?)
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  They're hybrids. Powered by batteries recharged by small ICE/turbine engines.
geon 12y ago
Whoa, that's dark. I was just watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc for the n:th time. It's hilarious.

by netcan 12y ago

kmfrk 12y ago

They won't stalk you, if you check the opt-out field.

zachrose 12y ago
Though of course it will be an opt-in field that's pre-checked and surrounded by opaque verbiage.

joubert 12y ago

Google owns Boston Dynamics

izak30 12y ago
Not that I'm on the dystopian future train, but "Don't be Evil" isn't a Google policy.
- Thrymr 12y ago
  Yes, it is: http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html http://investor.google.com/corporate/code-of-conduct.html

tootie 12y ago

Look at it another way. People involved in deadly combat have a kill or be killed mentality. Extreme caution for personal risk means you have to shoot first and ask questions later in a war zone. Not so for robots. Send them in to take prisoners. If they are destroyed, build another. Charge them until the enemy runs out of bullets. Send them close enough to use non-lethal rounds or wound legs and move on. And forget about looting and rape. Forget about collateral damage caused by bombing city blocks from the sky and hoping most inhabitants are bad. Imagine if we could shut down ISIS with $500M worth of material and no lives lost.

acadien 12y ago
The other possibility is the irresponsible over use as with drones. If they aren't too expensive you could just strap a bomb on one of these and run it towards any possible threat. I agree with your assessment and look forward to the onset of more nonlethal warfare. I'm just saying the opposite effect is also possible.
- icehawk219 12y ago
  We already have irresponsible over use of drones and so far all we have are ones that can fly around and drop bombs on people. And the government goes to great lengths to make sure people are totally emotionally uninvolved in the decision and execution. Once these end up in the military it'll only be a short while before they also end up on our police force. You think the cops are bad now? Wait until they've got a small army of drones to do their bidding. It's entirely possible that that never comes to pass but the US' current direction doesn't instil a ton of confidence.
  - fargolime 12y ago
    Nor does the US' past direction. Since the 1950s it has toppled two democracies and thwarted another. The (final) overthrow of its own democracy may become possible through such technology.
  - tootie 12y ago
    "You think the cops are bad now?" I don't really. And the same benefits would apply. When cops stormed the room of Amadou Diallou and thought they saw a gun, their only option was shoot to kill. Send in a robot, and now you don't care.

btbuildem 12y ago

Yeah, there should be an equal amount of parallel effort put into developing technologies that would allow us to destroy these machines and permanently disable their subsystems. Today, politicians still have to convince people to commit industrialized murder - tomorrow, the robots will obey orders without delay.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

pjc50 12y ago

database of 7,000 known enemy combatants The database is a more worrying prospect than the robots, in a lot of ways. Who gets to designate "known" and "enemy"? What if it's the Tinder eigenfaces program? Automatable ethnic cleansing? Then what of the occupation? Robots aren't great for political legitimacy. Do you have them return fire on the kids throwing rocks at them? Unlike human guards I suppose they can sustain IED losses forever. But they're an A1 prime target for hackers...

yellowapple 12y ago
> What if it's the Tinder eigenfaces program? On the other hand, dispatching BigDogs and Spots to go on dates as proxies would be an interesting prospect.

snissn 12y ago

http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...

lkbm 12y ago
I'm generally not a fan of Newsweek, but now I definitely want to read that book. Thanks for posting this.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

That is a compelling visual. Another one might be that the truck drops off its dogs carrying first aid supplies and disperse though out the city looking for victims of some disaster. Human instinct is to go with threat first, friend later, I expect that served us well during our cave years. Humans have had a standoff attack capability for a while, and yet the number of deaths due to "war" has been going down for a while.(I'll admit that I'm not sure what to call the ISIL thing.) So where does that leave us? In a place where managing outbreaks with the lowest possible loss of life to non-combatants. And if you believe the narrative that the police are shooting people because they 'fear for officer safety' then you can certainly make the argument that an officer that is on site in a teleoperated way has no personal risk and should therefore not shoot anyone or anything except to save the life or lives of innocent civilians. But we all know that is impractical in a non-war situation.

angersock 12y ago
Still, the problem with having occupation-style technology and drones is that it further spreads the power of those with capital at the expense of those without. The current class setup prevents truly depraved and evil systemic evil (beyond a point) from occurring, because officers and soldiers are human and will blatantly refuse to do things that are Evil (perpetually). There is no such guarantee with drones--in fact, to refuse orders is a design flaw. I can't help but imagine some descendant of these things, in the mode of one of Bradbury's mechanical dogs, attacks a throng of protestors.
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I do not disagree, my hope is that, as with other technologies, especially dual use ones, we will be able to keep them biased toward the positive uses. Robotics, like genetic engineering, nano-technology, and data mining can do good things and bad things. It is important to focus on the good things, remain cognizant of the bad things, and maximize the value. I would be sad to see robotic quadrapeds "banned for civilian use" because they can be weaponized, because they can also get to people in need in dangerous and hard to reach places. In a more current events sort of way, I am in favor of severe punishments for people who weaponize drones and fly them in public places, or people who manufacture and sell such drones, but I am not in favor of banning personal ownership of drones. I am willing to risk that someone will show up where I am with such a device, and the risks to my personal safety if they employ it in a deadly way, in exchange for the freedom to own and experiment with drones in a responsible way.

jimmytucson 12y ago

> Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy? Actually, Boston Dynamics is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc.

legohead 12y ago

Someone sets off a large EMP and all the dogs suddenly freeze, and fall over.

ChuckMcM 12y ago
Or the dogs are encased in a rectifying antennas and they say "yumm! recharge time!" The whole point of weaponizing something is to make it resistant to the more obvious attack strategies :-).
jjoonathan 12y ago
...and the next version gets an extra $5 of shielding per dog* and so is made completely immune to even a H-bomb EMP. * at a $5000 markup, but who's counting?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

jobu 12y ago

It is creepy as hell to watch them walk, and that makes me wonder what groups like ISIL would think about being hunted by a small pack of them. Right now dropping bombs on houses kills some terrorists, but the collateral damage has a side-effect of bringing more to their cause. Would attack robots scare the shit out of them and make them stop, or just backfire and end up as another recruiting tool for fundamentalists?

riggins 12y ago

Just reading Bing West's A Million Steps, so that obviously is affecting me, but the first thing I thought was this would be great for saving soldiers from getting blown up by IEDs.

notatoad 12y ago

yeah, i've always kind of scoffed at the people saying boston dynamics robots are scary. They're an amazing technical accomplishment and they make me really excited and happy to see them. but as soon as i saw that shot of two robot dogs side-by-side, moving in almost synchronicity, something turned in the pit of my stomach. There's something very dystopian sci-fi about that image.

rasz_pl 12y ago

'don't be evil to me, or else'

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

Since WWI / WWII, the fate of wars has been decided by the size and complexity of industrial output, instead of the strength and bravery of men. This is just goes further in the same direction.

adventured 12y ago
Other than industrial output, politics is still (and will always be) one of the largest determining factors. Politics can take a vastly superior force and render their outcomes impotent on a battlefield.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

Florin_Andrei 12y ago

I don't know if this is such a huge game changer for war. I mean, we had wheels for solid ground, and machines that can fly through the air, and boats for water, and hovercrafts for ambiguous terrain. These cute dogs are ultimately not that revolutionary. I am much, much more worried about evil applications of multirotor drones. Anyway, all of the above is an exercise in futility without decent AI. The robot dogs can run - so what? As long as they're pretty dumb they can't do much damage. Now, an AI running a dog chassis, or flying a quadcopter, that's an "interesting" thought.

bitwize 12y ago
Wheels are notoriously poor at navigating rough terrain; that's why we build roads. We could build a vehicle with wheels or treads so huge it effectively flattens anything in its way, and we do -- but for some missions (support for a squad of soldiers on foot, say) it makes sense and is much cheaper to build a small legged vehicle.
- BatFastard 12y ago
  Is it possible that these could make roads obsolete? Now that is an interesting concept.
  - bitwize 12y ago
    Probably not because wheels are VERY efficient at transport across smooth level terrain, and a wheeled vehicle is less easy to destabilize than a legged vehicle. So when deciding between wheels vs. legs, it will be the usual sort of engineering tradeoff: which one offers the greatest advantage for your application?

swamp40 12y ago

...and as the last human alive scrambles up a steep hill, with 100 robo-dogs close behind, he stops and drops to his knees as he finds himself overlooking a steep cliff, with no where left to run. "Why?", he looks up and asks the first robot, as it skids to a stop next to him. One by one, a dozen other robo-dogs surround the human. An armored plate drops open on the chest of the first robo-dog, revealing a small lcd screen. And the above YouTube video begins to play. The video stops after showing the callous human kicking Spot, the proto-ancestor of all the robo-dogs present on this hill. The kicking scene begins to repeat on the screen, like an old gif. And silently (for the robo-dogs were never given a true voice box), the leader lifts one robotic leg and with a single powerful pneumatic kick to his ribs, sends the last human alive flailing over the edge of the cliff.

bitwize 12y ago
"Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them. He has a little yard all to himself. It has a fence around it. He knows he can't jump over the fence. He's never actually tried to jump it, because he knows be can't. He doesn't go into the yard unless he has to. It's hot out there. He has an important job: Protect the yard. Sometimes people come in and out of the yard. Most of the time, they are good people, and he doesn't bother them. He doesn't know why they are good people. He just knows it. Sometimes they are bad people, and he has to do bad things to them to make them go away. This is fitting and proper. Out in the world beyond his yard, there are other yards with other doggies just like him. These aren't nasty dogs. They are all his friends. The closest neighbor doggie is far away, farther than he can see. But he can hear this doggie bark sometimes, when a bad person approaches his yard. He can hear other neighbor doggies, too, a whole pack of them stretching off into the distance, in all directions. He belongs to a big pack of nice doggies. He and the other nice doggies bark whenever a stranger comes into their yard, or even near it. The stranger doesn't hear him, but all the other doggies in the pack do. If they live nearby, they get excited. They wake up and get ready to do bad things to that stranger if he should try to come into their yard. When a neighbor doggie barks at a stranger, pictures and sounds and smells come into his mind along with the bark. He suddenly knows what that stranger looks like. What he smells like. How he sounds. Then, if that stranger should come anywhere near his yard, he will recognize him. He will help spread the bark along to other nice doggies so that the entire pack can all be prepared to fight the stranger." --Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

scotty79 12y ago

What I'm missing in your vision is dozen of short range microdrones with needles covered in neurotoxin taking off of each of the dogs backs.

lolpep8 12y ago
Those would be chemical weapons. Those can't be used, because they are inhumane.
- andybak 12y ago
  I find Churchill's words to be fascinating when read closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemical_weapons_in_Mesopotamia_in_1920 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alleged_British_use_of_chemica... The wording is callous and shocking to my modern ears but - if you start with the premise that you are already in a violent conflict (I'm not addressing the issue of colonialism here - just the debate about the comparative ethics of bullets and explosives vs chemicals) then this sentence stands out: "It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas." We have some ridiculous Hollywood-fed beliefs that bullets and explosions create clean deaths and painless injuries.
- scotty79 12y ago
  Not really. Chemical weapons are applied unselectively and have a great potential of using against civilians. I don't think many people would mind guided poison arrows. But I appreciate your irony. :-)

Jack000 12y ago

I imagine swarms of quadcopters would be better for that task. Less chance of being blocked by physical barriers and lower cost = more units. They're so cheap you wouldn't even need rounds, just pack on some explosives and self destruct when near.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

asdkl234890 12y ago

Any chance Boston Dynamics will adopt a don't be evil policy? They are owned by Google now. But let's not pretend Google's don't be evil policy makes a big difference these days.

superuser2 12y ago

... for 3 minutes, until the batteries give out and they all need to be charged for 5-6 hours. (But actually, what is the battery life on these things? You still have the problem of heavier battery = more drain on battery. I wonder where the break-even point is?)

toomuchtodo 12y ago
They're hybrids. Powered by batteries recharged by small ICE/turbine engines.

geon 12y ago

Whoa, that's dark. I was just watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXJZVZFRFJc for the n:th time. It's hilarious.