Artificial Intelligence; The Day the War Began

Please take the time to watch the video below before we begin:

Creepy. Genuinely creepy yes? Not just creepy though, sinister and more than a little disconcerting! The slipping on the ice bit? Tell me you didn't shiver!


'Big Dog' from Boston Dynamics is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the hopes that it will be able to serve as a robotic pack mule to accompany soldiers in terrain too rough for conventional vehicles. Instead of wheels or treads, Big Dog uses four legs that contain a variety of sensors, including joint position and ground contact.


Ok...that sounds...ok. Does it though?!


Also in development by Boston Dynamics is Atlas

Ehhhhhhh what?! Sorry has no one at Boston Dynamics seen Terminator? (the movie in which robots try to wipe out mankind) That is a Terminator with no head...that is all that is! They have even posed it the same way as the Terminator promo statues!

It's fine though! The computers required to run robots as advanced as these are large, as are the battery packs..doesn't that make them cumbersome and not really suitable for mass production? Anyway its not as if they can turn on us! Once we program them they can't learn new skills or new ways of thinki.....what sorry? Oh..

Enter cloud robotics AKA Skynet (another Terminator reference.)

"Cloud robotics," would allow robots to offload computer-intensive tasks like image processing and voice recognition and even download new skills instantly, Matrix-style (yes that's right the same Matrix in which robots enslave mankind.)

According to James Kuffner, a professor at Carnegie Mellon currently working at Google, cloud-enabled robots could offload CPU-heavy tasks to remote servers, relying on smaller and less power-hungry onboard computers. Even more promising, the robots could turn to cloud-based services to expand their capabilities.

So we have robots being developed for the military, some of which look like Terminators that could potentially start to learn as they are all linked up to what is, ostensibly, a hive mind?

Seriously, if you have watched Terminator, The Matrix or any number of post apocalyptic man vs machine sci fi movies, this should all seem eerily familiar and if you haven't then I recommend that you do to pick up survival tips.

I have had many conversations with friends about this phenomenon.  We really do seem to want to push technology in directions foretold (or forewarned) in old sci fi novels.  Is it a lack of imagination now, seriously inspired fiction from the past or is it coincidence?

As one friend said, maybe someone should write about a cure for some horrible disease now...it seems a sure fire way to ensure we invent it in the future!

If "the machines" do become self aware and turn on us though, let us all redirect them to 0:36 secs into our opening video and hopefully they will go look for that guy who kicked big dog in the side.