Robot Gladiators etc

I hadn’t realised how good these things had got:

Looks to me like the toy end of things is evolving slightly faster than the weapons end of things… the latest example of which is this

traditionally ugly looking offering from the military etc – it basically being the bottom 1/2 of the also ugly Big Dog which to me looks like some sort of giant motorised flea-creature that’s dying for a piss. Still – at least with this picture we get to see what the muscles are made out of – actuators rather than motors by the looks. I always have thought this was the way to go rather than servos.

All this is sort of semi inspired by the news that “A Georgia professor is writing ‘ethical governor’ for combat ‘bots”, which is wishful thinking if ever I saw it… because it instantly creates an imago-like jigsaw-puzzle-piece-fit sister-document “the rules for engaging military robots, exploiting their ethical no-go areas”.

Suicide Bomber Children in other words.

Robots always were going to be made to fight. First. You can see it in the way the toys we’re making are doing just this… what’s the first thing we do with vacuum-cleaner robots, after they’ve finished tidying up, and we’ve put the cat on them? We get them to fight obviously:

It’s utterly inevitable.

And at one point I thought it might be quite fun – I mean they look pretty easy to beat don’t they?

Well they did at one point. Now not so much.

Warbots. Machine-Generations. FFS. Are we vacuuming ourselves into a corner here? I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.