See The Terrifying Robot Dog With Sniper Rifle Attached
A robot dog with a rifle attached to the top is the thing of futuristic military nightmares. It looks right out of a science fiction novel
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We’ve seen enough movies at this point to know that robots will eventually rule the Earth, and make us their obedient servants. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is they do all of that and then just wipe us out of existence. It can’t happen any other way and each day we get increasing evidence that it might end up happening sooner than later. The latest piece of impending doom comes to us from the “good” folks over at SWORD International and will surely live on in your nightmares of a dystopian future. It’s a robot dog with a sniper rifle attached to the top. With this thing, there might be nowhere to hide.
The robot dog with a sniper rifle on the top of it was unveiled at a conference for the United States Army. It is called the SPUR, short for Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle and the company touts it as “Warfighters best friend”. You can see what I mean below and tell me that this isn’t right out of some futuristic movie in which society has gone completely off the rails and robot feet are crunching into human skulls across a bombed-out landscape.
For this robot dog “initiative” SWORD is working with another company, Ghost Robotics on this new terror. The latter touts itself as creating “Robots that feel the world” which frankly doesn’t exactly make me feel any better. The company has been in production on its Q-UGV (Quadrupedal Unmanned Ground Vehicles) for some time now. The Q-UGV is what see above but they worked with SWORD on attaching the rifle aspect of the robot dog. It’s of course, this is a combination that does inspire some fear. The technical specs put out there by SWORD and Ghost Robotics were indeed very technical. The jargon boiled down to a simple thought though: the robot dog with sniper rifle attached is fast, agile, and extremely accurate.
There was some piece of comfort when the head of Ghost Robotics, Jiren Parikh, discussed some of the automation behind the robot dog. In its current iteration, it is 100% controlled by humans and he assured New Scientist that there was no artificial intelligence, yet.
Of course, we’ve already seen other robots out there that are more than capable of controlling their own actions right now. Plus there are examples of other robots, like this robot dog, being employed by government institutions. There was an example of the New York City Police Department using one to send into certain domestic situations. Public outcry dialed that back significantly. And then there was the robot called Leonardo that could fly and basically catch a human anywhere. Not exactly where we want to go with these things.
It’s likely only a matter of time before our own Armed Forces begin using a robot dog like this in battle situations rather than a human on the ground. From that standpoint, I suppose it’s “better”. But we are still looking at a pretty scary situation on a macro level. This is actually out of a science fiction movie, except now it’s here in front of us.
