[jackhack]

It's about perspective. Imagine being pinned down by a squad of these things for "only" 60 minutes. Or being pursued through the forest or an urban environment. That 60 minutes would feel like a very long time.

For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero (1980's Sweden overtaken by armed robots, including robot dogs).

[brlewis]

That would be terrifying, but a squad of trained humans is still more terrifying. If you're worried about what a military is going to do, robots are mostly a distraction.

[qayxc]

> Imagine being pinned down by a squad of these things for "only" 60 minutes. Or being pursued through the forest or an urban environment.

Given the current state of these machines, both these environments would favour humans. Even a fairly untrained average Jane or Joe would have no problems outrunning these things in forests or urban environments, let alone a trained soldier. Not to mention the lack of autonomy.

Everything you see in these promotional videos is carefully choreographed, prepared and pre-programmed in advance for days, and edited:

"There were definitely some failures in the hardware that required maintenance, and our robots stumbled and fell down sometimes." - they shot the first part several times and kept the one that worked best. That's not something you can do in the field outside of a controlled environment.

These robots are still long ways away from posing more of a thread to a soldier than much simpler solution, e.g. a Humvee with a mounted machine gun.

> For a glimpse of this, check out the videogame Generation Zero

The game is based on fiction, not fact, though. The required autonomy just isn't there yet and the video game robots clearly run on magic, not electricity or petrol. They never overheat, they are maintenance free, and they move faster than is currently possible w.r.t. motion planning and image recognition.

It's your typical AM/FM affair: BD is actual machines - pre-programmed or remote controlled, very limited endurance and still impractical for most military applications.

The robots in video games and cinema on the other hand are for the most part in the domain of fucking magic - capable of "120 years of continuous operation on a single power cell" like the Cyberdyne Systems series 800 v2.4 (Terminator), turning themselves from "autonomous swords" into screaming humans (Screamers), are nearly indestructible like Vision (Marvel's Avengers) or strange spiky flying thingamabobs like the Sentinels (Matrix trilogy).