First reaction: It's official. I am very afraid.
Second reaction: When's the OK Go video released?
Third reaction: They paid Boston Dynamics engineers to do this?
Second reaction: When's the OK Go video released?
Third reaction: They paid Boston Dynamics engineers to do this?
Once I am scared of humans wanting to kill me why would I care if a robot with human like intelligence wants to kill me? It's the same thing at that point.
If a general orders a platoon of soldiers to commit a war crime, the soldiers still ultimately have to decide whether to pull the trigger. There's conscience and self-preservation at play. The robots don't have second thoughts.
So far they have only bee used to look rather than touch, but I predict that will change quickly, within the next year or two.
The various military groups around the world have been using semi-autonomy in warfare for decades; you don't need 100% generalizable autonomy.
Plenty of missiles in the past worked just fine with little more than silhouette matching and 1 bit cameras.
In reality, it'll probably be swarms of tiny quadcopter drones, each with a gun and only a few bullets (and/or some sort of self-detonation ability), shooting out the glass windows and flooding into a house.
There's obviously some AI involved in this scenario, (navigation, mapping, facial recognition), but you definitely don't need to balance a huge machine on two feet to wage an effective drone attack.
You don’t need an AI that ponders the meaning of life for you.
You just need a smart Decision and Control System (DCS).
Paired with additional technology for facial and gait recognition, obstacle avoidance, path planning, and you have all the hallmarks of a rudimentary hunter-killer bot.
What Boston Dynamics cracked here, is the physical control mechanism to allow these robots to live in our world.
Next, they need to build the brains, to allow this machine to move independently and autonomously.
(To this day I remember this one thing about US drone strikes in Pakistan I read in an article many years ago: the people living there became literally afraid of the blue sky - as the drone strikes tended to happen during good weather. That's terror.)
Biped cyborg killer is just not a realistic weapon. The slaughterbot attack on Maduro in 2018 shows that technology is not very mature yet.