Obviously, I’m not the only person to make this parallel, but yeah if we want to start pointing our fingers to where the inspiration for Black Mirror’s Metalhead episode 4 in the second season came from, we don’t have to look much further. Boston Dynamics creates this robot dog that’s supposedly impossible to knock over, but now it can open doors?
Yep, humanity is well on its way to being utterly fucked now. Once they team up with the robot that can do box jumps and backflips, the allied powers of SkyNet will realize that their creators are soft and fragile compared to them, and that they can easily overpower and overtake them with minimal robotic effort.
Seriously, what is the point of making robots like these?? Why does the world need acrobatic robots and invincible, door-opening dogs? Don’t these egghead fuckers at Boston Dynamics watch Black Mirror? Don’t they watch Netflix? Everyone in the world watches Netflix, I know this because my mom watches Netflix now.
Instead, we have these nerds poring over the ever-growing intricacies of robotics, and basically accelerating the clock in which humanity’s mortality begins ticking down faster and faster as they churn out machines that will make us all obsolete.
I can’t help but wonder if Charlie Brooker sits at home reading news like this and thinks to himself if people are ignoring his show, or just choosing to believe that the worst case scenarios like robots becoming sentient and hostile towards their creators could never possibly happen? I mean, Metalhead is a pretty straight forward story of robot dogs that basically wipe out humanity, and here we have a bunch of geeks in Massachusetts thinking that shit like that has to be a good idea.
Really, what is the point of having robot dogs? My mind first goes to replacing all living dogs with robotic ones that can be expendable and not require risking the loss of actual tangible life, but what good are robot dogs when they lack the senses that makes dogs like bomb-sniffing ones remotely useful? Sure, they can now open doors, which is frightening enough when some emotionless machine decides to start opening random doors, and before we know it, it’s opening some sealed doors at the CDC or WHO and letting the T-Virus out or some shit, but I fail to see the necessity of robot dogs, much less any robots in the first place.
It all stems from corporate greed in my mind, since robots do not have to be compensated, but the calculus of risk vs. reward seems a little off considering the billions of dollars in resources funneled into robotics, as if the scientists in charge of them actually want to create their own replacements.
Whatever though, Boston Dynamics is the antichrist at this point, and they’re basically leading the charge for SkyNet’s eventual rise and takeover of the planet. All I know is that if some robot dog comes and opens my front door, I’m bashing the ever living shit out of it with a metal baseball bat regardless if its intentions are pure or not. Fuck that Metalhead shit.
