On Friday, a video of a robot dog firing bullets from a machine gun mounted on its back began circulating across the internet. The clip shot in Russia at the time of the publishing of this article had over 7.6 million views and over 27,000 retweets.
The robot, which looks something made by American company Boston Dynamics, was equipped with an automatic weapon and can be seen shooting at targets on a firing range with a rifle mounted to its back. The recoil consistently knocks the robot back, but it can be seen readjusting to make sure its shots are accurate. The robot is likely Chinese-made though.
The video fueled talks about the dystopian nature of such technology and many people online compared it to watching an episode of Netflix’s The Black Mirror.
Sean Chiplock, a gamer and streamer, shared the video on Twitter with the caption, “All the people who laughed off the “worrywarts” years ago for freaking out about the Funny Dancing Robot Dogs should be forced to watch this video once a day for the remainder of the year.”
Other users online pointed out that the robot could be from the Chinese company Unitree Robots. According to Cybernews, Sophos Senior Threat Researcher Sean Gallagher says the bot in the video is from the company and is its Go1 robot dog, which sells for around $3,000.
The video seems to have originally been posted by Alexander Atamanov on his Youtube in march of this year. Here’s the original video.
The clip was proven to most likely be from Russia as the country’s flag can be seen on the side of the robot and the other side shows a wolf’s head – a symbol commonly employed by Russian Special Operations Forces. The armored vehicle in the video is also a Russian made armored BRDM-2, according to Yahoo News.
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A video of a Boston Dynamics robot was released in April showing one of their similar looking robots patrolling the ruins of ancient Pompeii. Watch.
Skynet is here and they are ready to rumble. That’s a joke, but it does seem to be some stuff from a dystopian future. These robots might look kind of cute and harmless in most videos, but when strapped with automatic weapons, they are much scarier. Do you think videos like this show we are heading toward a dystopian future?
