perfidy

The internets are buzzing about two recently-released videos of new DARPA projects featuring motile robots. Both videos are fascinating, yet positively awful. Try to hold back the horriplations from your scalp as you watch this six legged robot climb any vertical surface in a way eerily reminiscent of how crustaceans and larger insects do move. If you thought watching a computerized Tom Hanks in "The Polar Express" was a creepy experience, remember that Tom Hanks is not considered to be much of a threat to one day eat your skin and enslave your children to labor in uranium mines.

And once you've shaken off the nasty thrill of the climbing bug-bot, check out this robotic pack mule, "affectionately" dubbed "Big Dog" by its irony-deficient creators. Click on the video to watch the Great Dane-sized Big Dog easily navigate on four legs over flat surfaces, mud, snow, gravel, schist, and hills of up to a 35% grade. Also watch for Big Dog to react quickly to retain its balance when kicked. Again, the thing reacts distressingly like an actual, living creature.

And although the Ministry is beginning to feel like the kids from South Park when, halfway through Season Three, they began reacting with boredom every time Kenny died ("uh, right. Oh my god. They killed Kenny. You bastards."), doesn't DARPA see the problem here? As with the million other distressing advances in autonomous robotitcs, we wonder: do they want humans to have no refuge where robots cannot get to them? Do they secretly wish to commit species suicide? Or do they simply think that humans will be in charge forever?

Inquiring minds want to know!