BigDog

I assume PETR will be all over his case and he’ll be cited for cruelty to robots.

It crosses both sets of legs on the kick, so you can take it out with a good second kick after the first one.

I like the horde-of-locusts sound as it walks though – the Daleks would be proud.

I dare anyone to not anthropomorphise that.

(Well I felt sorry for it went it stumbled on the ice, even if no-one else did.)

Can’t they paint these things with some happy colours so that I can avoid getting the Blade Runner feeling.

At least slap a smiley face sticker on it!

To answer my own question, Boston Dynamics seem to be claiming it’s all onboard:

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

What year is it that Skynet becomes self-aware?

It is a foregone conclusion that such robots will be armed and sent into combat as merciless killing machines. What kind of people would do such a thing? Oil-thirsty Americans.

While certainly impressive, I think it’s realistic to assume that the “kick” and “ice” scenes were all “Take 43″s.

There is no doubt whatsoever that semi-autonomous killing machines will be used by the US armed forces. Extrapolation of progress in relevant hardware and software technologies suggests that such perfect killers will be in service within a decade.

An interesting consequence of this emerging class of weaponry is the added urgency for less-developed countries to acquire nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons can still equalize great disparities in military capabilities, neatly neutralizing hordes of shiny new American killbots.

21 and 22 are both true.

“What year is it that Skynet/Internet becomes self-aware?”

Not too long after someone programs in algorithms for conditioned response and the requirement for survival/continuity.

I take some comfort from it’s poor ice performance, living as I do in the fridgid North. With this and killer bees, I now have a genuine list of ways I won’t die specifically because I bother to endure this crappy climate.

This robot is not so scary because it could be mounted with an auto-aiming minigun turret and set loose, along with hundreds more, in a city, though that would be pretty scary to be anywhere near. But what makes this thing really frightening is that we’re only a few years away from it being mounted with a camera and an arm or two and being able to do all the manual labor on, say, an aircraft carrier. Writing software that replaces pilots is going to be comparitively trivial and once these guys can prep a dozen stealth bombers for launch we have a world-mobile, nuclear-fueled killing force that could be completely under the contol of a singe person, or yes, a hostile machine intelligence.

More than the potential for AI to decide to wipe out humanity, which I think does deserve serious thought, I’m concerned about the potential robotics has to concentrate power even more completely to an arbitrarily small group of people. The President may command the military but if he ordered a carrier group or a Trident submarine to lay waste to Iran, or Switzerland, or the blue states, he would meet increasing levels of insubbordination throughout the chain of command. In some of those cases the first person the order went to would object and that would be enough. But with a fully automated military, anyone with the power to issue commands to it is, like the invisible man, free to do whatever he pleases with it without having to look anyone in the eye. And I think that is the single greatest and most fundamental check against indecency we have.

Of course, I could be wrong. At least the robot army won’t force you to watch it rape your wife or daughter before blowing your brains out.

Sorry to go Godwin on you, but Hitler didn’t exactly need robots in WWII, and there has been no shortage of atrocities and illegal wars in our primitive human powered military history.

25 is I think a little OTT. It’s all very well building a robot which can walk (and it’s marvellously impressive and will have all sorts of civilian applications) but building a robot that can autonomously maintain a stealth bomber is a monumental software task. It’s not the mobility, it’s vision and problem-solving intelligence – which are both huge unsolved puzzles.

Also, to be honest, this doesn’t really open the way for killer robots. It just opens the way for killer robots with legs. If mobility were the key technology for killer robots, we would already have killer robots with wheels – which are established technology.

Of course, I could be wrong. At least the robot army won’t force you to watch it rape your wife or daughter before blowing your brains out.

The ethical dimension of deployment of robot soldiers is a fascinating domain. Since terror is an instrument of warfare, robots could be programmed to do arbitrarily terrifying things. On the other hand, deviation from decision rules, such as whom to kill, capture, or release, would not occur, so there would be less terrifying randomness in the madness of warfare.

Like most technologies, I believe that the robotic soldiers would simply amplify the good and bad characteristics of human personality. Nuclear weapons will remain the best insurance against ingenious neighbors and their killing machines.

It just opens the way for killer robots with legs.

Right. The robots when they show up are likely to be cheap and tiny airborne guns. There are already predator drones, why not a swarm of small motion-detecting one-shot helicopters that don’t stray outside a particular area?

Let bots sort ’em out.

they’d make for excellent wheelchairs!

(see, I’m the smiley-faced liberal fascist at its very best)

why not a swarm of small motion-detecting one-shot helicopters

As we saw on the Simpsons, those could be outwitted by luring them into a closet full of dynamite.

Fascinating. I wonder why they settled on the trot as its standard gait. Is there some basic commonality with a horse, or is it just coincidence?

But the real question is: what about when it meets a deer fence?

Reminds me of an old cartoon with a few daleks at the foot of some stairs and one says, “that buggers our quest for world domination”.

While we are on the subject on advanced robots I was never wholly clear why The Terminator was programmed to speak with an Austrian accent. You see, even cyborg software engineers can miss the big picture sometimes, too.

i’m with the people above who felt a little creeped out by how lifelike the motion of this machine seems…but beyond that, i actually found myself thinking about how this advances the science of prosthetics before i thought about how it advances the science of warfare. and then i started thinking about transhumanism, and i got creeped out again.

, at least in the short term, to address the problem of getting supplies to the front line under combat conditions.

This is almost certainly wrong. The whole point of this thing is that it doesn’t require a human operator — that’s why it’s autonomous reactions to verious hazards are such a big deal. (That’s also what it’s got going for it over Jeff Davis’s mules.)

People will be following the same path as supplies to the front. Where you want this robot is in places people can’t or would prefer not to go — a possibly booby-trapped building, say.

Well, maybe. The thing about paths in areas immediately behind a static front is that the other side is going to know where they are and register mortars and artillery on them. If these thingies could make their own routes for each trip, their survival rate would go up.

A question that hadn’t occurred to me is whether any of the sensors that are enabling this to avoid obstacles will work in the dark.

42: All very good points Ajay. Thanks. Of course, I still think it’s a little more than obscene that you now have a robot that is 1000 times the cost of the living-breathing equivalent but I dare you to say that it is 1000 times as good. Enjoy your recession.

52: Really? How exciting. Too bad they’re not working on a cure for the millions of people, governments and investment banks who buy overpriced stuff they don’t need.

One of the more insidious ways the automobile was grafted onto human physiology was with that bullshit “Well, if you don’t like this, then go back to that.” “That” being the cliched stereotype awful, brutal, primitive, ugly, dangerous past, and don’t forget those way-too-short lifespans! And, and, no medicine! And dirt! And worms and fleas! Might get eaten by a bear! Or a lion!
Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death in the US for people under 30. That means children. CDC.
The choice is not between cars and one-horse shays, pick one. The choice is first between this way and any other way.
Once you decide to go a different direction you have a near-infinite number of possible paths to choose from.
The self-interest and sniveling greed that saturates that b.s. binary is fully exposed and no longer viable.

Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death in the US for people under 30. That means children

Well, something has to be the leading cause of death for children under 30. That it is traffic accidents is really a consequence of the fact that relatively speaking almost no one under 30 in the US dies of diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, rubella, measles, cholera, pertussis, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, tetanus, malaria, infantile diarrhoea, gas gangrene, industrial accidents, black lung, botulism, heavy metal poisoning, hypothermia, kwashiorkor, pellagra, scurvy, syphilis, beri-beri, house fires, murder or malnutrition any more. It’s not that traffic accidents are solely the result of the internal combustion engine; they were common in the horse-drawn age too. It’s just that all the previously more-common causes of death are now no longer nearly as common.

Fortunately for roy belmont, intemperate language and an inability to think clearly are also much declined as causes of death from the days when
they could lead, respectively, to death in a duel or death at (say) the Little Big Horn.

Roy, are you really this upset about a robot with legs?

No, taj, I love the machine. It’s the techno-chauvinism in some sections of the audience, that makes me puke. I love the 1989 Lotus Elan. I love my Asus dual-core that I built my ownself. My Geo Metro. My electric guitar. My Canon Rebel…
It’s the chauvinist cliches I’m speaking to.
Primary being ajay’s trope of “If you don’t like the automobile and its triumphant dominating presence you have to go directly back to the horse-drawn wagon, and contract polio.” As though progress is inevitably linear.
Alternate futures that incorporate robot donkeys that act like giant flies are fine with me, it’s this one I’m having trouble with.