Robotic dog-mounted rifles are now a thing thanks to US Army

TheOneWithTheHair@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 259 points –
interestingengineering.com
45

The continued aggressive sheer will of the US government to take every cautionary tale ever written and make it reality.

God, this is such worthless doomer shit. Oh fucking no, the military can reduce lives lost in times of war. T H E H U M A N I T Y!

It's like you want Russia to walk over eastern Europe using 50 year olds weapons.

What vacuum said.

We have reached the final frontier of pussies making machines to destroy their "enemies" machines... and unarmed civilians.

I guarantee you the US is not going to send these robots to Russia.

They are going to deploy them on impoverished people and on the boarders to murder immigrants.

And then inevitably into cities that are protesting Fascism.

Its own lives, so it's not about humanity, it's about arming yourself.

But, of course, nothing that ominous in this either.

I know it's the correct way to word it, but this sounds like rifles on robotic arms mounted on real dogs

Oh thank God, I misunderstood and was shocked by the barbarism.

some style guides are really dumb and consider "a b-c d" to be "(a b)-(c d)", as if a hyphen is less tightly binding than a space

Anyone still remembers when they said they would never use dog robots for weapon/war purposes? I do. Things always age like milk and it's unsurprising.

Boston Dynamics said that, and they have stuck to that commitment. IIRC it's even in the contract when you buy a robot from them that you will not equip it with a weapon.

This article is about Ghost Robotics, which has never made such a commitment. They are known to supply gun-equipped robots to governments at all levels.

I recently visited the Boston Museum of Science where they have one of the Boston Dynamics robodogs on display, and they did a live demo with q&a. All I could think of the whole time was that one black mirror episode...

Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other's supply lines / storage first.

The way Russia's turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.

The future will never be about drone vs drone, as no one cares about the drones. They have to hit where it hurts, which is human life.

Best case scenario, wars will be fought over drone command centres. Much more probably drones will be used to increase civilian suffering to end the wars.

So, how soon is it until they cram ChatGPT, Tensorflow, and a few others into this thing and actually make a Terminator?

Also, let me know if anyone sees any naked dudes crawl out of some lightning balls.

Concidering we already have robotic birds dropping explosive on enemies in curren warfare, this really isn't that big of a deal

Automation is the big deal. Drones have cameras so humans can make a (hopefully) informed disision to strike or not. When (read; now) the drone doesn't need a camera because it can make the call without a human in the loop, we have removed a vital bottleneck.

The only thing that stopped WWI from being total war is that when we wipped out an entire generation, we needed time to grow more troops. If autonomous weapons being manufactured autonomously by autonomously constructed factories... whoever controled the drones could of conquered the world.

No, that assumes that resources and energy are unlimited. This is the main problem with any "grey goo" scenario.

And it wasn't people being killed that stopped WW2. People are killed in every war. The defensive weaponry was more powerful than the offensive weaponry. Machine guns were only used on defense because they were heavy. Also, artillery was not mechanized so it was hard to move everything forward quickly.

Not to mention millions or even billions of robotic drones that monitor us all.

We're now a step closer to making dogs with BBs in their mouths and when they bark they shoot BBs at you.

Atlas's brothers are in the making. The are searching for a proper name ... any suggestions?

If I were a dog, or the creator of dog, I would say:

This beast is such an insult!

Totally stiff in the spine, stamping worse than a cow on dope, and that stiff body must stay horizontally at all times.

What a gross misconstruction.