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Take a look at the . Looks like they've really made some progress. Still too loud though with it's lawnmover sounding motor. Things need a good muffler.

They're reinventing the horse?

Beats reinventing the bicycle.

They are kinda cute, with those little stomping legs. But do they take suger lumps as fuel? Can you pat them on the back? And, finally, do they smell?

Yeah, they're reinventing the horse. They're supposed to be able to carry 300 lbs but this version looks larger. They have two military backpacks on each side so 400 lbs? Fewer men, more gear. It might make a lot of sense if they had a built in generator for recharging gear. Eventually they'll probably stick a 50 cal machine gun and a tow missile on one.

These are 10x quieter than the first version but still very loud , which to me would be a tactical disadvantage. The idea is to have a vehicle that can cover most terrain so it's intended to follow soldiers into battle.

Oh man, wouldn't my D&D players love to have this as their mule...

These things are actually fairly impressive. I assume they have certain advantages over horses (who are living beings after all and thus may be more complicated to maintain than robots in the long run), and besides, this is a prototype application. If it can carry gear, it can also carry bombs for example.

There are also bipedal robots that work fairly well now.

Also, some robots are really fast - I think one manages 20km/h or thereabouts. I'd have to search for it though.

Give this technology another ten years and we'll have terminator or c3po like robots.

Now, if only AI research could catch up.

Oh yeah, thanks for dropping me in it, Nils.

You don't want things like this to have AI. You just want them to do what they're told!

When I say AI I mean actual AI, not autonomous behavior. We've become pretty good at making software do very complex things, but truly general "intelligence" eludes computers. I guess we'll have it when we get fusion power and Linux on the desktop.

Intelligence? Until humans agree on a definition and neutral measure of it, it would be unfair to judge computers. Computers may well be showing signs of intelligence far greater than ours already - we just move the goal posts to what intelligence is and make up a new measure that we know computers can't do. It is a piecemeal descent into a biased able-bodied-human-only philosophy of intelligence.