[quickthrowman]

> Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.

Boston Dynamics is a defense contractor, their future prospects are designing and manufacturing war machines, the same thing they’ve always done.

The dog robots are meant to carry stuff/support combat troops.

The humanoid robots are designed to rescue injured soldiers and possibly other risky tasks.

They may have plans to commercialize these robots, but I’m not sure where the consumer/commercial market for robotic dogs is. Jobs that need machines to carry heavy stuff already have solutions and have had them for a long time, and they’re safe to operate as long as you’re not in a combat zone. I guess it would be nice to have a robot dog portage my packs and canoe for me in the BWCA but I’m not spending new car money for that.

[heisenbit]

Looking at actual combat robots in Ukraine Boston Dynamics robots are conceptually different and not necessarily in a convincing manner.

[ajmurmann]

Those robot dogs have been looking amazing for as long as I can think. What's in the way of the big military contract?

[chairmansteve]

In Ukraine they are using tracked autonomuous vehicles for the same tasks. Much cheaper.

[roenxi]

It is remarkable how rarely alternative movement styles like slug crawling, flying or rolling get used in the animal kingdom to move around compared to 2-8 legs. If a company can figure out how to do legs and manufacture them cheaply I expect there'd a be a lot of money in that; they must have some sort of practical advantage somewhere in warefare.

Although the tracked drones we see starting to appear in war are terrifying and I'd rather not be on the receiving end of them.

[coryrc]

Because biological slip rings don't scale, not because it wouldn't be more efficient on an energy standpoint.