The robot dogs are coming

And they are not here to play fetch

Photo by Phoenixproduction licenced through Shutterstock.

There’s enough to worry about, I know. But I’m afraid we need to add killer robots to the list. Just look at these robot dogs.

Manufacturers are keen to emphasise their potential use for things like heavy industry and small parcel delivery, but it’s easy to imagine how they could be weaponised. Not that we need to — shows like Black Mirror and War of the Worlds have already shown us what we can expect.

There are a few different models and at present the fastest can reach a top speed of 17 km/h. The average person can sprint 24 km/h, but we aren’t battery powered and can’t maintain that speed for long, so good luck outrunning one of these things.

And it’s not just killer robot dogs on the horizon. In March 2020, a small autonomous drone may have killed people for the first time in the Libyan Civil War. It was a single drone, but software developers are hard at work on swarm programming, so in the future we can expect swarms of them, like the kamikaze drones from Angel has Fallen (2019).