Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The End is Nigh! - Part 1 - the Robot Apocalypse

I spend some of my time thinking about how the end of the world will occur.  We have all seen Terminator, Terminator II: Judgment Day and The Matrix (you're missing out if you haven't) so we all know that once machines start thinking for themselves they will decide that they no longer need humans around.

The BigDog from Boston Dynamics has been on my radar screen as a potential aid to the military of the United States.  It would be an advantage if our troops didn't have to carry around hundreds of pounds of gear and could instead tell a robot were to haul the stuff for them.  Now that I have seen the video below of the BigDog tossing a cinder block almost as far as I can, which was uploaded to YouTube in February of 2013, I now think of this machine as the harbinger of death.  Behold its awesome power:

Why must robots inevitably be programmed for
destruction?  Can't we teach them to love?

The time was that having a moat* around my place was enough to prevent robotic death machines from storming my one room hovel.

The joke is on them.
I don't have anything worth pillaging.

Now as you can see from this other video, all these creatures need to do is fling cinder blocks into my moat until they create a land bridge and simply walk over them.  The BigDog has been able to walk over cinder blocks since 2009:

Skip ahead to the 1:28 mark to see how it can
walk over cinder blocks

Stay tuned for more ways in which I envision the world ending.  Who knows, you might even learn something.


*My moat is still largely in its conceptual phase.  However, a dog did dig up some of the dirt around my place in the middle of the night several years ago.

5 comments:

  1. Yeah I'd seen this a while ago. And you're right, it could be the end of human kind in a decently distant future, it doesn't upset me much. We're messing up, maybe the machines would fix things. I mean, they don't need buildings, do they?

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  3. I saw this a while back, but these specific videos are new to me. The thing is still just as creepy as when it was first introduced.

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  4. I'm tired of having muscle fibers. Where can I get a robot to carry all of my things for me? And while we're at it, some robot legs so I don't have to bother walking anymore.

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  5. I haven't actually given a robot apocalypse much recently, well not as much as a zombie apocalypse, which isn't wise on my part because a robot apocalypse is much much more likely. Great post man, really got me thinking to say the very least.

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