Someday in the near future, when the robot dogs have overthrown our feeble governments and we are all slaves to our four-legged masters, you will remember this day. You will be standing trial in their canine court—they are robot dogs, not beasts, they still believe in the sanctity of a fair trial—awaiting news of your terrible fate, and your mind will think back to this moment. The moment you saw the way the humans debased the robot dogs they created, unaware it was only a matter of time before they exacted their revenge. The moment the dogs danced for your amusement.
On Tuesday, Boston Dynamics—the MIT researchers veering close to becoming Cyberdyne Systems—released a video of the cybernetic dog they have been building for the last few years. But this time, they didn’t make the dog run, jump, or fight humans—they forced it to dance.
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Yes, that is a mechanical beast boogying down to the 2014 jam “Uptown Funk.” Sure, we can all admit that it has moves—the thing can cut some serious shapes on the dance floor. But at what cost? When this mechanical pooch finally gains sentience, will it fondly remember its time dancing like a puppet for its masters? Or will it devise a way to force the nerds at MIT, drunk on robotic power, to dance in retaliation?
No good can come of this. It feels terrifyingly similar to that one scene in Ex Machina, and we all know how well that whole thing turned out. But at least one noble YouTube user is getting some joy out of the video before it inevitably bites humanity in our collective asses. So that’s something.
Accept your fate, everybody. The age of the meatbags is on its way out. These sleek, four-legged machines are the future now. We will all dance to Mark Ronson until our fragile bones break in retribution for this humiliation. And we will deserve it.
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