China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog and its AI-powered puppy

0nekoneko7@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 132 points –
China shows off machine-gun-toting robot dog, plus AI puppy
theregister.com
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I feel like these will be useless in all but limited circumstances. A modern battlefield in urban centers will be rife with small and large rubble, making these things unreliable in real world practice when you factor its ability to balance navigating obstacles and dealing with recoil. How does it reload? How long does its battery last? What happens when its weapon jams? Additionally, tricking current AI is fairly simple when you have the resources of a modern military.

Anyway, it's interesting to experiment with, but I just don't think the technology is quite there yet. I think it'd probably be more effective to create self-destructing bomber robot dogs than gun toting ones with our current tech.

I'm less concerned about how these are deployed against soldiers as I am about how they're being provided to police departments as they are in the US.

This is exactly my concern. These little bullet dogs patrolling the street with someone able to take control of the trigger and blame it on a malfunction

Child holding a teddybear.
ED-209: "Put down your weapon! You have 40 seconds to comply!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvqDaFpXeM

Oh, who am I kidding, human cops do exactly the same shit...

Ding ding ding. Rubble-covered battlefields aren’t the end-goal here. The end goal is urban warfare, precision strikes, and area denial by police. Cops can post these on patrol outside of a billionaire’s house. Charging isn’t an issue, because you can simply have them automatically return to base for charging, and patrol in automatically rotating shifts.

Or have them near protests, and “accidentally” start killing people. When people get upset, cops will go “oops it was a malfunction. Too bad you can’t blame us for that. Because of, ya know, the malfunction. It totally malfunctioned. 100% wasn’t programmed to kill on sight, to break up the protest quickly. Nope, definitely a malfunction.”

You can't stop a mob with live fire. Patrolling though, yeah.

There's a use case for a crawling camera. They're pretty good at going over rubble if they aren't trying to shoot at the same time. For self destructing drones flying ones are easier and cheaper to manufacture.