The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods:
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Submission statement: what Black Mirror episode are we going to experience next?
Would it be better or worse if they tried to make the robots less creepy?
Which country do you think will have the first robot dog homicide?
Why do some scientists keep building Torment Nexus?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1drbef9/video_shows_chinas_rifleequipped_robot_dog/latxmo0/
Well yea, did anyone think we weren't going to put guns on these things? The pistol-welding quad copters still seem scarier... Can show up outta nowhere, kill and be a mile away without a trace in no time
"Sir, our target isn't responding to the asset, he keeps calling her a 'thot', we can't get into the compound"
"What do we know?"
"Well, he has a collection of obscure imported figurines, hasn't showered in a month, and spends 3 hours every day trying to get Linux to work properly"
"Send in the imuotu-bot"
I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that at least 20% of the country has no immunity to "Hot WAIFU-robot" should they be turned into killers.
"David-son, You so sexy."
"I know you are about to kill me, but, can you take your time?"
Giggles behind hand.
"Ooh, can you do that sign all the cute Lolicons do?"
2 hours later, police attempt to wipe a stupid grin off David's face before having his parents identify the body.
STD bombs placed in the sec bots holes, explodes with infected germs on contact. Boom “it wasn’t an assassination, he just got every single std at once, I’m sure it was a coincidence…
I mean, when looking at foreign threats, there are countless ways they could attack.
Like putting just a tiny dab of explosive in all those imported airpods people use... one signal and BOOM.
Or any of the WiFi enabled devices that have no reason to be online (your fridge? Your vacuum?). Send a signal to "malfunction" and mix to normally benign compounds internally to release a toxin. The list goes on.
We're all just lucky that no one has decided to go there yet. It's fucking terrifying.
(This is what I get for being an author... I spend waaaaaay too much time pondering this kinda shit).
It's wild to me that anyone can look at think "that's cool" and not "that's terrifying." The first group is who are marching us head first into the slaughter, with stupid smile on their face the whole way. The second is whose gonna have to attempt to solve the problem the first group made. I really am starting to miss when climate change was going to be the event that killed us. This new season is bullshit lol.
PS I'm not a luddite. It is "cool" on a level, but it's much shorter lived than the dread that comes after processing what these devices mean in the long term.
I figure this problem will be "out of sight, out of mind" for a while. Global warming will cause populations to move to be able to live -- and behind the scenes, some state actors or billionaires with God complexes (which ones don't have them?) will support killbots and drones. So it will be a bunch of refugees being killed. The corporate media may or may not report it, depending on if the narrative is useful I suppose. And any authorities will shrug and say; "Looking into it, can't find the culprit." Or point at the usual suspects -- if it fits the useful narrative.
I see it inching along, and any PrIVATE use of these drones and robot killers will be of course, terrorism. Any poor person fighting back is about the only thing the media will cover in this new shitty thing to come.
We are so screwed. Use of killbots and drones won't be WrONG until it kills some rich people. And then they will only focus on the "terrorism" -- again, that's poor people fighting. Like an improvised explosive is more terrifying than a "lawfully" used cruise missile.
There are way more positive implications of technology like this than negatives. Everything is scary if you're a panic driven doomer.
The time to be scared of this level of tech was like 15 years ago when drone swarms started taking off, not now. IMO, nowadays everything scary happens on the microscale. 30 years we're gonna have to worry about inhale/swallowable micro drones that will stop your heart then disassemble themselves.
I wish a drone with a pistol was as scary as they already are.. 5 mins on r/combatfootage and you'll realize we are already in the time of drone instant death warfare.
It was. That's why Boston Dynamics has entire pages in their contracts devoted to restricting weaponization of their bots. They can't stop knockoffs from doing it, however.
Watch combat footage with the Ukraine UAVs, taking out tanks and you can see how it can be miniaturized.... Then add a good guy radio tag that's encrypted and anyone in the zone without that tag is a target. This can be done today right now with little effort. Let that sink in.
Edit: A few words and better grammar.
Pffft, try cheap $500 drones carrying a 0.5kg tnt payload with AI facial recognition camera. Zoom into your face and blow your head off. Fully autonomous so jamming can’t prevent them.
I saw a hypothetical Tedtalk about it if someone is kind to share the link here.
But yeah… technical advancement. Does anyone really expect it not to be militarized? So China is putting guns on robots… now US must do same in response. It’s an arms race since the Stone Age.
> and blow your head off
that's roughly enough to blast all your parts off each other, and off themselves, as well as those of everyone in a dozen meters, probably still kill people in 50m, and injure people within 100 meters without any deliberate fragmentation
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/blast-radius
I’m predicting that armies will field out literal RC jet planes and equip them with a full auto 9mm for close air support
The literal equivalent jets attacking giant monsters
We’re like 20 years out from swarms of Hunter-Seeker drones the size of dragonflies using AI to identify and kill targets.
I feel like 20 years is being generous.
We have banned chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, so I don’t see why not. I’m not optimistic considering how fucked up the world is today, but I’m gonna keep saying it.
Because when you know you're going to have a limited supply of combat robot prototypes, you design them to accept off-the-shelf functional attachments. Once you're ready to start mass-producing them, it may make sense to design either specialized variants with integrated functional hardware or an integrated modular component system.
I kinda doubt it. Maybe in a decade or two whenever the full application of drone warfare become more realized.
This is the point where fantasy and reality diverge, like going back to the 50s and seeing what they imagined we could do with nuclear, versus what the realities became in the present day.
Robots with guns were the fantasy; explosive-equipped drones are the reality.
One US infantryman costs almost 1 million dollars to fully train, equip, transport, and supply. And they can roll an ankle and be out of the fight before they even leave the plane. I can't imagine these bots will be more expensive in the long run. And less human or less allied casualties is a big win. I don't like it. I think war shouldn't become bots vs people. But it's going to. I don't see how we put the brakes on this one. Loitering munitions alone are terrifying, cheap, and incredibly effective.
WW3 won't see highly trained infantrymen pitted against eachother, bots will turn the battlefield too deadly to bother, we're going back to WW1 meat waves.
How would meat waves help against the too-deadly-to-bother bots ? Unless you mean Zap Brannigan strats, meat waves will just get mowed down all the same. Meat waves, also, were never an intended tactic anyway in WW1, they resulted from technology moving faster than people could keep up so--
Hey, maybe you're right, it just might be meat waves all over again.
EMP weapons and signal jammers are already in use and will counter this. If they can block manual control then AI can be probably be fooled with a mannequin and heated blanket.
I wouldn't put a ton of faith in signal jammer.
As a semi-educated guess ground units would run with human overseers of a sort.
Any jammer would have to be so stupidly powerful to block all channels and it would be fairly easy to give them a autonomous routine to swarm said jammer when master signal launch and destroy it OR to hunker down in defensive positions until jammer is dealt with by air units.
Emp hardening is a thing. And the only way to create a sizable emp is through a solar flare or nuclear explosion tuned for it. So I wouldn't put your stock into emp weapons real life isn't a video game.
And even if you neglect your veterans they are still plenty expensive.
A drone not only saves you the cost of a soldier before, during & after war, that same person continues paying taxes instead of serving.
A person goes down after one hit then may need expensive medical care for the rest of their life.
These things could be armored up to sustain a more hits before they go down.
**Edit:** Yes, good point from the commenter below - wounded humans also sap the morale, time, and money from their friends and family.
And when they do go down, you go "oh well" and buy another.
Ukrainian soldiers are coming back from the front in body bags, they're coming back missing limbs and eyes and with brain injuries, they and their families are going to suffer from this for decades to come. Bring on the robot soldiers, IMO.
And the ‘oh well’ will be followed up by ‘activate self-destruct’. Theres no way they’ll just leave this bot hanging around to be grabbed and repurposed. If it is disabled, it will definitely blow itself up to try take out more soldiers and prevent salvaging.
A person has to be born, raised, fed, educated, trained. If he is killed or traumatized in action, he is not producing anything in the economy, that's is why estimates of economic loss from covid might as well be in trillions. As well as loss of prospects for the families of affected, compensations from the government.
Neural networks can be copied from device to device. Metal and plastic are abundant enough thanks to human ingenuity. Cheap drones that cost a grand can neutralizeor destroy multimillion tank. It is literally counterproductive for a competitive economy in the long run to destroy people in such a stupid manner.
Yeah, country like russia or any other country ruled by a short-sighted authoritative regime might be capable of winning battles or conflicts through sheer human grinding, but it comes at a greater cost down the line. Every destroyed human life is a potential . War is, first and foremost, an economic war. That's why human capital is the capital.
No.
These things are a joke. It's just propaganda to make China look high-tech.
This is a cheap knock off of the Boston robotics dog from 20 years ago. It has to travel with several people because it falls over every 2 minutes. There are a bunch of videos.
Have no fear of China. They are a paper tiger and we're strangling their currency to death currently.
Thanks for posting this. I knew I saw Unitree's dog somewhere before. I mean, they didn't post a long term test but it's ability to get back up after being thrown in a rough manner is really impressive.
>It has to travel with several people because it falls over every 2 minutes.
Seems like a model with updated weights from longer training will fix that though. Their flaws seem negligible, something that can be improved with refinement and iteration for a few more years and then be ready for 2027 or some shit. Being naive seems less logical than paranoid in this current decade.
I agree that China is constantly doing fluff-job videos to look more advanced than they are. But you have to admit, a month after Boston Dynamics has worked out all the bugs (mostly the battery power and computing power for them to be autonomous), China will be damn sure to steal the information to mass produce them.
I dont think this is even close to the potential of the technology. Imagine training it aggressively in simulation to duck, hide under cover and shoot at targets while moving.
E.g. like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXQG2_85V0
Yeah, there's going to be an arms race based on improving the speed, agility, intelligence, and accuracy of these things. In ten years time we might see autonomous droids running and ducking at 40 miles per hour while simultaneously firing a mini chain gun.
> In ten years time we might see autonomous droids running and ducking at 40 miles per hour while simultaneously firing a mini chain gun.
Shades of the cybernetic dogs in Mona Lisa Overdrive.
*The Simpsons* nailed it back in the 90s:
> The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In any case, most actual fighting will be done by small robots, and as you go forth today remember your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.
military always been on top of innovation, i don't doubt once we solve fully autonomous humanoid they will put a gun in their hands well before we mass produce any of them for the industry
while i understand why people could be scared about fully autonomous killing machine we better be scared about the fact that within 10-20y not a single Human could die in a war from the most developped side, said otherwise the biggest factor of not waging war will dissapear possibly making war more common against imperialism country and less developped one
that's a weird phase in Human history where Human won't be relevant in military or in production, hopefully the Infinite production scaling will reduce this desire for war in short and long term
we're probably closer to an utopia than any dystopia, the grey zone is that once we remove the labor in Human hands it only leave politic and we all seen that politic can and will be instrumentalised for nationalism purpose
imho we will end up in a world where living will be more simple, cheaper, careless but that probably won't remove all conflicts between nations in the long-term
we will i think see group of nations becoming federation based on culture/ideology, thanks to AI making economic difference and language difference meaningless, western union, some African group, the east-bloc, middle east union...wathever, every citizen of those country will see a massive increase of their lifestyle compared to today standard, but, they will most likely fight each other based on cultural and ideological/religious difference
life will get massively better but war will also get massively easier, it's neither a dystopia or a utopia...just different
>once we remove the labor in Human hands
That will make 90% of humans irrelevant to the ruling class. How much do you think the rich people are going to care about everyone else when they don't need them any more?
They have to wait until there are reliable autonomous tech support bots -- because they don't want to have to depend on the same humans they might need to kill when implementing their "very necessary" cullings.
Jeff Bezos must not be taxed! Say it or you go on the killbot list.
The US has had these for years. There were three companies at the last Army trade show I went to with these things running around.
They market them as platforms for fire fighting, bomb diffusion, etc, but they all are fully capable of mounting weapons.
https://www.ghostrobotics.io/vision-60
Yeah this is inevitable. Lets not pretend that the US isn't doing the same thing. China would be fools to not develop such weapons, as its enemies are doing the same. This is not an endorsement of what China is doing, it just make sense for them to do so from their POV.
Submission statement: what Black Mirror episode are we going to experience next?
Would it be better or worse if they tried to make the robots less creepy?
Which country do you think will have the first robot dog homicide?
Why do some scientists keep building Torment Nexus?
> Which country do you think will have the first robot dog homicide?
Done already
> Use of a police robot to kill Johnson
The killing of Johnson was the first time in United States history a robot was used by police to kill a suspect. The Remotec ANDROS Mark V-A1, a bomb disposal remote control vehicle used by police, was rigged with about 1 pound (0.45 kilograms) of C-4 explosive.
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/08/use-robot-kill-dallas-suspect-first-experts-say/
remote controlled by a kill happy Texan is NOT making me feel any more secure than the autonomous.
"Clearly, the officer was firing in self defense!"
No further questions from the reporter.
Well, thanks so much Boston Dynamics, which was once owned by Google, for making the killing robots of the future 🙄 Selling these robots around the world, to be reverse engineered, was a bad idea.
I like how this thread has both
1) "Boston Dynamics is NOT to blame for this, they were only making them because they knew China would make them and we need to make them to counter theirs. We're making them defensively."
and also
2) "China is incompetent, they have zero ability to make things on their own, they stole the designs from us, those bastards."
As if America has not been at the forefront of making new tech (which sometimes becomes weapons tech) regardless of who their geopolitical foe is. I dunno why people feel the need to hide behind such claims.
Ah yes, A static mounted chinese rifle firing 5.56 using an offset realsense camera. This is nothing new or groundbreaking, accuracy would be shit and without any attenas the controller would have to be very close. More affective to just use a grenade to clear rooms then 10's of thousands of dollars of a mcgyver toy.
Any regime controlling a certain amount of killer bots and drones will be able to supress their citizens basically indefinitely, since it won't rely on being backed by human military forces anylonger. In fact even if the actual military turned against their own dictators, they wouldn't stand a chance if the technological development reaches a certain level. Ultimatetly whoever controls most of the state of the art drones and supporting technology controls the world.
Was there ever any doubts this would happen? Where there's technology, there will be military applications, it has been like this since sticks and fire
I do love the decades of varying media sources of how badly AI controlled weapons could be and instead of showing any caution at all the first thing we do before we iron out all the bugs is strap QBZs to the backs of robots. I feel like we're skipping a few steps here before handing them weapons. Guess we didn't value asimov's laws of robotics either.
If not the military will get as close to they can. If current wars have told you anything you don’t want the fanciest of these gadgets you want quantity over quality, so I’d imagine there’d be a few fancy ones you drop in propaganda but most would be simpler very similar to something you could buy off the shelves.
That is the stupidest shit I have ever seen. When it runs out of batteries, do you have to literally carry it off the battlefield? When it runs out of bullets or the gun jams, who's going to address that? China literally amazon'd a dog drone and just strapped a gun to it. 2-4 hours of battery life. Not even amazon, Temu
I wish that was how they will be used. On the other hand, it is better than putting people in harm’s way in the case of handling a terrorist situation or a hostage taking.
there an obvious solution to that problem
Brannigan: "**You see, killbots have a preset kill limit.** **Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.** **Kif, show them the medal I won."**
I mean this was inevitable. There will be entire swarms of these things with different weapons attached. I’m sure the US has a bunch in a bunker somewhere in Nevada
Mileading Title. Not a single scene showed a "robot dog opening fire on targets". It just shows robot togs opening fire. No targets at all. I dont even think these abortions will be acurate enough. You can clearly see how the gun is shaking with the whole robots body. There is no way this has an accuracy better than a simple claymore.
Wow, I just wasted my time watching a video of a rifle shooting into thin air. There are no targets in the video and the robot is certainly not hitting any targets. It looks like the most useless technology ever.
The US did this 11 years ago. Much scarier stuff aswell. I have the pictures. I participated in the training. My original comment was removed for apparently being too short. I smell something rotten in Denmark. I hope this is long enough now. I sincerely hope anyone reading this has a superb day. Goodbye.
I was expecting something "cooler" tbh. Lol. Like batman style, or 007, where the gun retracts into the body or something. Not an actual riffle stuck onto the dog and drone. Makes it look so silly.
robot dog with rifle is pretty underwhelming.
in the sense that i've seen what a bunch of small crappy flying drones with a hand grenade can do. strapping small arms to a robot dog that costs like 200-300 grand a pop just seems stupid to me.
in short robots on ground : cringe
robots in the sky : based
With Elon Musk claiming to be ready to offer human bots for 10k I imagine it’s just a matter of time before people start adding 6+ guns, blades and other weapons to them and using them in this manner.
China with the black mirror dogs is plain silly anyways, firearm equipped flying drones are far superior.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/katxwoods: --- Submission statement: what Black Mirror episode are we going to experience next? Would it be better or worse if they tried to make the robots less creepy? Which country do you think will have the first robot dog homicide? Why do some scientists keep building Torment Nexus? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1drbef9/video_shows_chinas_rifleequipped_robot_dog/latxmo0/
Well yea, did anyone think we weren't going to put guns on these things? The pistol-welding quad copters still seem scarier... Can show up outta nowhere, kill and be a mile away without a trace in no time
Humanity never waits very long after inventing a new technology before strapping a gun onto it
I feel like "technologies not yet weaponized" would be an interesting list... Probably some notable exclusions (on the weaponized list)
AI sex dolls used as Trojan horse assasins?
"Sir, our target isn't responding to the asset, he keeps calling her a 'thot', we can't get into the compound" "What do we know?" "Well, he has a collection of obscure imported figurines, hasn't showered in a month, and spends 3 hours every day trying to get Linux to work properly" "Send in the imuotu-bot"
I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that at least 20% of the country has no immunity to "Hot WAIFU-robot" should they be turned into killers. "David-son, You so sexy." "I know you are about to kill me, but, can you take your time?" Giggles behind hand. "Ooh, can you do that sign all the cute Lolicons do?" 2 hours later, police attempt to wipe a stupid grin off David's face before having his parents identify the body.
Oddly, uncomfortably…specific.
He died doing what he loved
Most of us feel personally attacked
Can't think of a better way to go.
“He only responds to 2D women.”
sounds like an arch user
All you'd have to do is find a way to hack into its OS system and download code... Murder.exe
One chomp and that's it.
Hydraulic thighs...
Have you not read Brave New World? Thighs must be pneumatic!
Now, this android could be system-matic. It could be hydro-matic, ultra-matic. WHY, IT COULD BE GREASED LIGHTING.
Ghost in the Shell
More or less the plot of Ghost in the Shell
STD bombs placed in the sec bots holes, explodes with infected germs on contact. Boom “it wasn’t an assassination, he just got every single std at once, I’m sure it was a coincidence…
Trojan Whores
These hoes ain't hoes
The British Secret Service has been looking out for them since the 60's. Behave...
new exciting way to deliver the virus- they’ll be lining up to die
Dunking the cosmic doughnut?
The list would be greatly diminished in size after its publication
> "technologies not yet weaponized as far as we know" FTFY
I mean, when looking at foreign threats, there are countless ways they could attack. Like putting just a tiny dab of explosive in all those imported airpods people use... one signal and BOOM. Or any of the WiFi enabled devices that have no reason to be online (your fridge? Your vacuum?). Send a signal to "malfunction" and mix to normally benign compounds internally to release a toxin. The list goes on. We're all just lucky that no one has decided to go there yet. It's fucking terrifying. (This is what I get for being an author... I spend waaaaaay too much time pondering this kinda shit).
That sounds like rule 34 but for killing… a better list would be “technologies that can’t be weaponized” and I fear that list would be short
I can't think of anything.
Door hing... Toilet brush... Cat litter box.... Shit. Everything can be weaponized
There are two things that drive human ingenuity: war and sex We're always finding newer and crazier ways to fuck and kill
Or go fast. Fuck, flee, fight seems to still be our biological drive
Ever since the first man picked up a rock we never stopped I guess.
rock now has facial tracking from a disposable smart phone, and uses $40 drone to deliver payload up to a mile away.
nothing drives tech more than porn and murder.
Side effect of spending so much on military :(
Oh good, humanity made man-hacks a reality and made them scarier than in half-life. Yaaaayyyyyy...
[Indeed.](https://youtu.be/rPul9WKQ6oQ?si=Scmno_s2149NBP_Z)
It's wild to me that anyone can look at think "that's cool" and not "that's terrifying." The first group is who are marching us head first into the slaughter, with stupid smile on their face the whole way. The second is whose gonna have to attempt to solve the problem the first group made. I really am starting to miss when climate change was going to be the event that killed us. This new season is bullshit lol. PS I'm not a luddite. It is "cool" on a level, but it's much shorter lived than the dread that comes after processing what these devices mean in the long term.
I figure this problem will be "out of sight, out of mind" for a while. Global warming will cause populations to move to be able to live -- and behind the scenes, some state actors or billionaires with God complexes (which ones don't have them?) will support killbots and drones. So it will be a bunch of refugees being killed. The corporate media may or may not report it, depending on if the narrative is useful I suppose. And any authorities will shrug and say; "Looking into it, can't find the culprit." Or point at the usual suspects -- if it fits the useful narrative. I see it inching along, and any PrIVATE use of these drones and robot killers will be of course, terrorism. Any poor person fighting back is about the only thing the media will cover in this new shitty thing to come. We are so screwed. Use of killbots and drones won't be WrONG until it kills some rich people. And then they will only focus on the "terrorism" -- again, that's poor people fighting. Like an improvised explosive is more terrifying than a "lawfully" used cruise missile.
There are way more positive implications of technology like this than negatives. Everything is scary if you're a panic driven doomer. The time to be scared of this level of tech was like 15 years ago when drone swarms started taking off, not now. IMO, nowadays everything scary happens on the microscale. 30 years we're gonna have to worry about inhale/swallowable micro drones that will stop your heart then disassemble themselves.
I wish a drone with a pistol was as scary as they already are.. 5 mins on r/combatfootage and you'll realize we are already in the time of drone instant death warfare.
literally the very first moment the first robo dog was shown to the world by boston dynamics, people said "put a gun on it"
Too young for Short Circuit?
They probably had a few guns drawn on the napkins when designing that robo dog. The idea of the gun was there way before the device was built
It was. That's why Boston Dynamics has entire pages in their contracts devoted to restricting weaponization of their bots. They can't stop knockoffs from doing it, however.
Except Boston Dynamics is against that and yet people keep spewing this crap.
The tiny ass drone with a micro kamikaze bomb is the most scary imo.
[This one?](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg&pp=ygUSZHJvbmUgaG9ycm9yIG1vdmll)
[This is scarier](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9fa9lVwHHqg&pp=ygUSZHJvbmUgaG9ycm9yIG1vdmll)
holy shit. miniature ai slaughter bots.
Eff me ... That's the new nightmare fuel
Watch combat footage with the Ukraine UAVs, taking out tanks and you can see how it can be miniaturized.... Then add a good guy radio tag that's encrypted and anyone in the zone without that tag is a target. This can be done today right now with little effort. Let that sink in. Edit: A few words and better grammar.
Sounds like Screamers!
Pffft, try cheap $500 drones carrying a 0.5kg tnt payload with AI facial recognition camera. Zoom into your face and blow your head off. Fully autonomous so jamming can’t prevent them. I saw a hypothetical Tedtalk about it if someone is kind to share the link here. But yeah… technical advancement. Does anyone really expect it not to be militarized? So China is putting guns on robots… now US must do same in response. It’s an arms race since the Stone Age.
> and blow your head off that's roughly enough to blast all your parts off each other, and off themselves, as well as those of everyone in a dozen meters, probably still kill people in 50m, and injure people within 100 meters without any deliberate fragmentation https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/blast-radius
I’m predicting that armies will field out literal RC jet planes and equip them with a full auto 9mm for close air support The literal equivalent jets attacking giant monsters
Literally nobody thought that. From day one it was “wait till they put weapons on these things”.
We’re like 20 years out from swarms of Hunter-Seeker drones the size of dragonflies using AI to identify and kill targets. I feel like 20 years is being generous.
And they never miss.
No, and I’ve been saying for a long time that the world must ban autonomous killing
Its a 100% not going to happen even if its a great idea.
We have banned chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, so I don’t see why not. I’m not optimistic considering how fucked up the world is today, but I’m gonna keep saying it.
These were quite underwhelming tbh. Why attach a gun to it rather than integrate a firing mechanism directly into the drone?
Because when you know you're going to have a limited supply of combat robot prototypes, you design them to accept off-the-shelf functional attachments. Once you're ready to start mass-producing them, it may make sense to design either specialized variants with integrated functional hardware or an integrated modular component system.
I’m just waiting for these things to appear in Ukraine and the debate over AI augmented battlefields to begin
"AI is democratising warfare!"
Gamifying the battlefield!
I’m pretty sure we’ve already done that
The Army literally produced one of the better FPS games of all time in "America's Army"
It was a good game for itsv time
"Embrace democracy, or you will be eradicated."
I kinda doubt it. Maybe in a decade or two whenever the full application of drone warfare become more realized. This is the point where fantasy and reality diverge, like going back to the 50s and seeing what they imagined we could do with nuclear, versus what the realities became in the present day. Robots with guns were the fantasy; explosive-equipped drones are the reality.
Explosive suicide drones are pretty much peak scary shit for me.
It’s a lot cheaper to put a person on the field with a gun than one of those things.
One US infantryman costs almost 1 million dollars to fully train, equip, transport, and supply. And they can roll an ankle and be out of the fight before they even leave the plane. I can't imagine these bots will be more expensive in the long run. And less human or less allied casualties is a big win. I don't like it. I think war shouldn't become bots vs people. But it's going to. I don't see how we put the brakes on this one. Loitering munitions alone are terrifying, cheap, and incredibly effective.
A mine is just a very very slow drone. Sort of how glass is a liquid.
WW3 won't see highly trained infantrymen pitted against eachother, bots will turn the battlefield too deadly to bother, we're going back to WW1 meat waves.
How would meat waves help against the too-deadly-to-bother bots ? Unless you mean Zap Brannigan strats, meat waves will just get mowed down all the same. Meat waves, also, were never an intended tactic anyway in WW1, they resulted from technology moving faster than people could keep up so-- Hey, maybe you're right, it just might be meat waves all over again.
EMP weapons and signal jammers are already in use and will counter this. If they can block manual control then AI can be probably be fooled with a mannequin and heated blanket.
For now. Emp hardened gear already exists and is getting better. I think this shit is going to get exponentially more complex in the next few decades.
I wouldn't put a ton of faith in signal jammer. As a semi-educated guess ground units would run with human overseers of a sort. Any jammer would have to be so stupidly powerful to block all channels and it would be fairly easy to give them a autonomous routine to swarm said jammer when master signal launch and destroy it OR to hunker down in defensive positions until jammer is dealt with by air units.
Emp hardening is a thing. And the only way to create a sizable emp is through a solar flare or nuclear explosion tuned for it. So I wouldn't put your stock into emp weapons real life isn't a video game.
It's gonna be bots vs bots in no time. Don't worry.
And even if you neglect your veterans they are still plenty expensive. A drone not only saves you the cost of a soldier before, during & after war, that same person continues paying taxes instead of serving.
A person goes down after one hit then may need expensive medical care for the rest of their life. These things could be armored up to sustain a more hits before they go down. **Edit:** Yes, good point from the commenter below - wounded humans also sap the morale, time, and money from their friends and family.
And when they do go down, you go "oh well" and buy another. Ukrainian soldiers are coming back from the front in body bags, they're coming back missing limbs and eyes and with brain injuries, they and their families are going to suffer from this for decades to come. Bring on the robot soldiers, IMO.
And the ‘oh well’ will be followed up by ‘activate self-destruct’. Theres no way they’ll just leave this bot hanging around to be grabbed and repurposed. If it is disabled, it will definitely blow itself up to try take out more soldiers and prevent salvaging.
How? Those robodogs are a few thousand a piece.
A person has to be born, raised, fed, educated, trained. If he is killed or traumatized in action, he is not producing anything in the economy, that's is why estimates of economic loss from covid might as well be in trillions. As well as loss of prospects for the families of affected, compensations from the government. Neural networks can be copied from device to device. Metal and plastic are abundant enough thanks to human ingenuity. Cheap drones that cost a grand can neutralizeor destroy multimillion tank. It is literally counterproductive for a competitive economy in the long run to destroy people in such a stupid manner. Yeah, country like russia or any other country ruled by a short-sighted authoritative regime might be capable of winning battles or conflicts through sheer human grinding, but it comes at a greater cost down the line. Every destroyed human life is a potential . War is, first and foremost, an economic war. That's why human capital is the capital.
Which is sad, playing an rts to settle wars would be better.
They have been using drones for ages
So when do we start cloning human soldiers and killing clankers?
No. These things are a joke. It's just propaganda to make China look high-tech. This is a cheap knock off of the Boston robotics dog from 20 years ago. It has to travel with several people because it falls over every 2 minutes. There are a bunch of videos. Have no fear of China. They are a paper tiger and we're strangling their currency to death currently.
The dog from the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O-8Nd9x63I
Thanks for posting this. I knew I saw Unitree's dog somewhere before. I mean, they didn't post a long term test but it's ability to get back up after being thrown in a rough manner is really impressive.
That poor robodog. Guy in the video will be amongst the first to go in the robot uprising.
A country with 1.4 billion people, the third biggest land area, a huge economy and nuclear weapons will never be a paper tiger.
Got a link to the videos?
>It has to travel with several people because it falls over every 2 minutes. Seems like a model with updated weights from longer training will fix that though. Their flaws seem negligible, something that can be improved with refinement and iteration for a few more years and then be ready for 2027 or some shit. Being naive seems less logical than paranoid in this current decade.
I agree that China is constantly doing fluff-job videos to look more advanced than they are. But you have to admit, a month after Boston Dynamics has worked out all the bugs (mostly the battery power and computing power for them to be autonomous), China will be damn sure to steal the information to mass produce them.
I dont think this is even close to the potential of the technology. Imagine training it aggressively in simulation to duck, hide under cover and shoot at targets while moving. E.g. like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJXQG2_85V0
Uh great [now fucking Wheelers are real.](https://youtu.be/2MLVfQOknYM?si=uw6lbH6Acm5kd8hb)
Return to Oz is a children’s horror flick.
[what? this pleasant movie? never](https://youtu.be/ErM4NvO6Ezg?si=WhYndNSAWx4qW9Ec)
Yeah, there's going to be an arms race based on improving the speed, agility, intelligence, and accuracy of these things. In ten years time we might see autonomous droids running and ducking at 40 miles per hour while simultaneously firing a mini chain gun.
> In ten years time we might see autonomous droids running and ducking at 40 miles per hour while simultaneously firing a mini chain gun. Shades of the cybernetic dogs in Mona Lisa Overdrive.
William Gibson is always right, eventually.
Found some more nightmare-inducing videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O-8Nd9x63I
That's adorable
Loved that dog at the end of the video trying to attack the robot.
Cool video! Thanks for taking the time to add it.
Militaries around the world watched that one Black Mirror episode and took it as an instruction video.
*The Simpsons* nailed it back in the 90s: > The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In any case, most actual fighting will be done by small robots, and as you go forth today remember your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots.
That is honestly one of the more terrifying episodes, especially the ending.
These are already a thing before that was released.
Episode is “metalhead”
military always been on top of innovation, i don't doubt once we solve fully autonomous humanoid they will put a gun in their hands well before we mass produce any of them for the industry while i understand why people could be scared about fully autonomous killing machine we better be scared about the fact that within 10-20y not a single Human could die in a war from the most developped side, said otherwise the biggest factor of not waging war will dissapear possibly making war more common against imperialism country and less developped one that's a weird phase in Human history where Human won't be relevant in military or in production, hopefully the Infinite production scaling will reduce this desire for war in short and long term
As humans we're incapable of creating utopia so it's the dystopian nightmare future where we're all repressed by terminator police units methinks
i think the future is Weyland-Yutani, not Starfleet. we are so fucked. actually glad now that i was born too early in the timeline
we're probably closer to an utopia than any dystopia, the grey zone is that once we remove the labor in Human hands it only leave politic and we all seen that politic can and will be instrumentalised for nationalism purpose imho we will end up in a world where living will be more simple, cheaper, careless but that probably won't remove all conflicts between nations in the long-term we will i think see group of nations becoming federation based on culture/ideology, thanks to AI making economic difference and language difference meaningless, western union, some African group, the east-bloc, middle east union...wathever, every citizen of those country will see a massive increase of their lifestyle compared to today standard, but, they will most likely fight each other based on cultural and ideological/religious difference life will get massively better but war will also get massively easier, it's neither a dystopia or a utopia...just different
>once we remove the labor in Human hands That will make 90% of humans irrelevant to the ruling class. How much do you think the rich people are going to care about everyone else when they don't need them any more?
This is authoritarian endgame. Deployable autonomous hardware.
They have to wait until there are reliable autonomous tech support bots -- because they don't want to have to depend on the same humans they might need to kill when implementing their "very necessary" cullings. Jeff Bezos must not be taxed! Say it or you go on the killbot list.
Counter point is hacking a guard and killing their masters with it. About to go Ghost in the Shell, but less cool.
Yeah, hackers are going to be our last line of defense and you know the most watched and despised group by the Oligarchy.
It nowadays feels like some one decided: Fuck it let's go full Skynet just to see what happens.
Yeah T2 was an inspiration for some instead of a warning
The US has had these for years. There were three companies at the last Army trade show I went to with these things running around. They market them as platforms for fire fighting, bomb diffusion, etc, but they all are fully capable of mounting weapons. https://www.ghostrobotics.io/vision-60
Yeah this is inevitable. Lets not pretend that the US isn't doing the same thing. China would be fools to not develop such weapons, as its enemies are doing the same. This is not an endorsement of what China is doing, it just make sense for them to do so from their POV.
We already know the US is looking at this stuff. I imagine it will be far more effective in civilian repression.
Submission statement: what Black Mirror episode are we going to experience next? Would it be better or worse if they tried to make the robots less creepy? Which country do you think will have the first robot dog homicide? Why do some scientists keep building Torment Nexus?
This is the worst one other than robot bees so I’d say we are thoroughly fucked good chap.
> Which country do you think will have the first robot dog homicide? Done already > Use of a police robot to kill Johnson The killing of Johnson was the first time in United States history a robot was used by police to kill a suspect. The Remotec ANDROS Mark V-A1, a bomb disposal remote control vehicle used by police, was rigged with about 1 pound (0.45 kilograms) of C-4 explosive. https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/08/use-robot-kill-dallas-suspect-first-experts-say/
Thats remote control though, that doesn't really scare me we've been using drones for a while. It's these AI dogs that scare everyone.
Yeah, not autonomous, which is where the debate is.
remote controlled by a kill happy Texan is NOT making me feel any more secure than the autonomous. "Clearly, the officer was firing in self defense!" No further questions from the reporter.
kill happy Texans gonna happen, RC or not.
Throw a couple of slinkies at it, won’t be able to get up
urban combat will become far more hellish. And not even media reports can deter it that much.
Well, thanks so much Boston Dynamics, which was once owned by Google, for making the killing robots of the future 🙄 Selling these robots around the world, to be reverse engineered, was a bad idea.
Lol As though BD is to blame. If it can be weaponized, it will be, and the DOD saw that spark of promise in BD
I like how this thread has both 1) "Boston Dynamics is NOT to blame for this, they were only making them because they knew China would make them and we need to make them to counter theirs. We're making them defensively." and also 2) "China is incompetent, they have zero ability to make things on their own, they stole the designs from us, those bastards." As if America has not been at the forefront of making new tech (which sometimes becomes weapons tech) regardless of who their geopolitical foe is. I dunno why people feel the need to hide behind such claims.
Ah yes, A static mounted chinese rifle firing 5.56 using an offset realsense camera. This is nothing new or groundbreaking, accuracy would be shit and without any attenas the controller would have to be very close. More affective to just use a grenade to clear rooms then 10's of thousands of dollars of a mcgyver toy.
Any regime controlling a certain amount of killer bots and drones will be able to supress their citizens basically indefinitely, since it won't rely on being backed by human military forces anylonger. In fact even if the actual military turned against their own dictators, they wouldn't stand a chance if the technological development reaches a certain level. Ultimatetly whoever controls most of the state of the art drones and supporting technology controls the world.
Was there ever any doubts this would happen? Where there's technology, there will be military applications, it has been like this since sticks and fire
I do love the decades of varying media sources of how badly AI controlled weapons could be and instead of showing any caution at all the first thing we do before we iron out all the bugs is strap QBZs to the backs of robots. I feel like we're skipping a few steps here before handing them weapons. Guess we didn't value asimov's laws of robotics either.
Isn't this the same robot dog a consumer can buy? This looks like a poor copy of us tech released over a decade ago.
If not the military will get as close to they can. If current wars have told you anything you don’t want the fanciest of these gadgets you want quantity over quality, so I’d imagine there’d be a few fancy ones you drop in propaganda but most would be simpler very similar to something you could buy off the shelves.
Well, that's China for you. Churning out $5 iPods and $500 killer dogs.
That is the stupidest shit I have ever seen. When it runs out of batteries, do you have to literally carry it off the battlefield? When it runs out of bullets or the gun jams, who's going to address that? China literally amazon'd a dog drone and just strapped a gun to it. 2-4 hours of battery life. Not even amazon, Temu
Self driving armored vehicle rolls up, 12 of these pop out the side and clear the engagement area before clean up forces move in.
Isn’t it a good thing that robots will be killing eachother instead of people?
I wish that was how they will be used. On the other hand, it is better than putting people in harm’s way in the case of handling a terrorist situation or a hostage taking.
A company should invent some serious EMP devices or something to easily just realize this shit
Just wait for its 30 round magazine to run out then drop kick that fucker to the moon
If you somehow survive their insane accuracy, sure!
there an obvious solution to that problem Brannigan: "**You see, killbots have a preset kill limit.** **Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.** **Kif, show them the medal I won."**
Seems a better fit for a r/dystopia. This is not the future I wished for. I needed robots to do all my house chores.
I mean this was inevitable. There will be entire swarms of these things with different weapons attached. I’m sure the US has a bunch in a bunker somewhere in Nevada
There is a game in early development, the forever winter with exactly this scenario. Scarily possible and eerie
[Metalhead, Black Mirror.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EcY6VDgz1M)
Probably cgi, these guys couldn’t even organise an olympique games opening without it.
Now this to me is pretty darn scary. Kinda reminds me of a futuristic movie where a police detective tracks down a killer using robotic spiders.
Mileading Title. Not a single scene showed a "robot dog opening fire on targets". It just shows robot togs opening fire. No targets at all. I dont even think these abortions will be acurate enough. You can clearly see how the gun is shaking with the whole robots body. There is no way this has an accuracy better than a simple claymore.
Wow, I just wasted my time watching a video of a rifle shooting into thin air. There are no targets in the video and the robot is certainly not hitting any targets. It looks like the most useless technology ever.
The US did this 11 years ago. Much scarier stuff aswell. I have the pictures. I participated in the training. My original comment was removed for apparently being too short. I smell something rotten in Denmark. I hope this is long enough now. I sincerely hope anyone reading this has a superb day. Goodbye.
Ok grandpa it's time for bed
I was expecting something "cooler" tbh. Lol. Like batman style, or 007, where the gun retracts into the body or something. Not an actual riffle stuck onto the dog and drone. Makes it look so silly.
robot dog with rifle is pretty underwhelming. in the sense that i've seen what a bunch of small crappy flying drones with a hand grenade can do. strapping small arms to a robot dog that costs like 200-300 grand a pop just seems stupid to me. in short robots on ground : cringe robots in the sky : based
With Elon Musk claiming to be ready to offer human bots for 10k I imagine it’s just a matter of time before people start adding 6+ guns, blades and other weapons to them and using them in this manner. China with the black mirror dogs is plain silly anyways, firearm equipped flying drones are far superior.
People forget that DARPA is actually a military project to create weapons of war.
UnHoly hell… every day we stray closer to the a.i. gods. Terminator Judgement Day getting closer and closer
Is it me or does that look like AI? NOt saying it's not real but something looks off about the video.
The dog turns into CGI midway through the video lmao
I want to see real life MechWarriors on the battlefield
[удалено]
Lol so it’s just a straight up reverse engineered Boston Dynamics robot?
I thought this was the disgruntled Boston dynamics employee creepy pasta…. I guess China decided to make it real