https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/marines-test-fire-robot-dog-armed-with-rocket-launcher
A rocket launcher-toting robot dog could give Marines a valuable new way to remotely attack armored vehicles, especially in urban areas.
Because what could possibly go wrong.
Knew BD was full of shit when they said they wouldn’t allow weaponization of their designs.
When the Military-Industrial Complex goes brrrrrrrrrrr, it's hard for companies to say no to the piles of cash that they offer.
There is a difference between being full of shit and plausible deniability. Their statement is as follows:
"We pledge that we will not weaponize our advanced-mobility general-purpose robots or the software we develop that enables advanced robotics and we will not support others to do so. When possible, we will carefully review our customers’ intended applications to avoid potential weaponization."
Which in layman's terms is:
"We don't SUPPORT groups weaponizing the robots and we won't give them special software to do so buuuuuut if they buy a robot for search and rescue purposes (and put that down for their use-case) only to later strap rifles to it? Well that's on them for using it against our wishes. We can't help what people do with their property"
BD doesn't make murder bots. They make incredibly advanced robot platforms that other people have made into murder bots. You seriously can't tell the difference?
The fact that you don't understand this is baffling to me. I don't think the explanation can possibly be simplified
No, sorry, I don’t think I’m smart enough to explain it in a way you’d understand….for…reasons.
Horizon: Zero Dawn, here we come!!!
Only about 20 years faster than the story predicted. Now which rich selfish tech billionaire will be the one to unleash the Faro plague on humanity….
My friend works in a open cast mine in Eastern Europe. The miners like to drink but it is strictly forbidden. They use mining explosives and one day decide if would be funny to blow up a stray dog. They strap the explosives to the dog and retreat to cover. About to trigger the explosive and turn round to find the dog standing next to them.
Human soldiers don't always say "no" when they should... but this thing will never say no to anything.
Depending on how cheap you can make this, you could drop hundreds or thousands of these onto a battlefield.
One of the scary things to me about this is that if something that can be made to look like this robot becomes available in a cheap enough model (same applies for drones) you can seek to overwhelm an enemy by swarming them with mostly harmless even cheaper versions (think toy robots and drones) and force the enemy to 3aste resources taking all of them out knowing that some of them might be armed, but not which.
E.g. you can buy $4k or so quadruped robots on Aliexpress while Boston Dynamics' ones reportedly costs in the $200k range. If you get that kind of ratio, for twice cost you can "augment" your armed robot with 50x decoys to drive up your opponents cost to eliminate the threat 50-fold..
In other words, I expect when these end up getting used, sooner or later it will be swarms of them...
Start at 4:00 if you want to see the extremely (!) unimpressive (!!) shot with the launcher.
Personally, I'm rather pleased it's unimpressive and that it wasn't running around hunting people down.
Yet.
Why are people in the comments talking like this is the beginning of an AI uprising? This thing is still remotely controlled by a soldier and not autonomous. It's about as dangerous as any gun, which is to say, pretty dangerous but nothing we haven't seen before. If you want an army of weaponised ribo dogs you'd also need an actual army of people to control them
Largely, I expect, because of the point you make. Needing an actual army of people to control them becomes a limiting factor. Add on to that that requiring remote control makes them vulnerable to jamming, and there's a strong incentive to start making them more and more autonomous both to enable fewer soldiers to control more bots, and to allow them to retain some function without it.
It just largely seems like it will be too significant a temptation.