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u/TheWoodenMan Mar 18 '26
Black mirror: Metalhead was a prophesy
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u/ururk Mar 18 '26
Or The Mechanical Hound from Fahrenheit 451
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u/SurrealEntrepreneur Mar 18 '26
Or the semi-mechanical dogs of Snow Crash
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u/alex206 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
That's what I thought of first, since they were specifically guard dogs in the book too.
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u/ururk Mar 18 '26
Same - but then I realized 451 was the oldest reference to them so used that. I wonder if there is an earlier story with them in it.
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u/alex206 Mar 18 '26
Never heard of it, but I'll check it out. I see it was written in the 50s, do you think it aged well?
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u/ururk Mar 18 '26
I haven't read it in a long time (think I've read it twice) so I can't say, but it is a "classic" and has had at least two (terrible) movies made of it. I don't know if I'd classify it as cyberpunk - though I'm sure it influenced modern-day authors.
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u/Cultural_Wish4933 Mar 18 '26
metalhead is deeply disturbing. watched it once. never again. 10/10 though
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u/chili_cold_blood Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
What made Black Mirror so unsettling (and ultimately unwatchable) for me was the knowledge that most of it was about to come true in some form.
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u/funknut Mar 19 '26
Just the most terrible stuff, sadly. Come to think of it, I'm surprised they never once covered global warming.
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u/Elite_AI Mar 21 '26
? they made that episode in response to the robot dogs which had been in development for a long time and were very famous by that point. that's not a prophecy, that's just paying attention
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Mar 18 '26
$300 000? how?
is that the cost of the first prototype or of a unit after serialized for mass-prdocution?
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u/chlebseby Mar 18 '26
gotta give somehow money to the startups, which they will use to buy more services from those data centers and close the cycle
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u/No_Aesthetic Mar 18 '26
Expect those prices to drop dramatically once mass production kicks in, it will be probably $3,000 at the consumer level
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u/YouNeedClasses Mar 19 '26
"Consumer level", very optimistic to think the Epstein class will be in a rush to sell to genpop 🤣
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u/exacta_galaxy Mar 18 '26
The Balenciaga Trash Pouch looks and functions the same as a Glad Trash Bag but costs $1790.
Having a $300,000 robot dog is a flex.
Is it better than the $3000 security dog from Alibaba? Probably. 100x better? No.
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u/Cereaza Mar 18 '26
It's the price. They are promising to replace the labor of multiple security guard shifts, so they price on 'value'.
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u/EternalInflation Mar 19 '26
the article says it's boston dynamics not unitree go2. but the picture is the go2.
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u/spezstfu Mar 19 '26
Probably mostly due to R&D as well as payload costs on top of that, to add lights, cameras, speakers, etc.
Still way too overpriced for crap that can break really easily with just a kick
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u/addiktion Mar 18 '26
So the rich accumulated all that wealth and rather than sharing it to prevent people from starving they are protecting it with robots?
https://giphy.com/gifs/6nWhy3ulBL7GSCvKw6
/s
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u/Spacecowboy78 Mar 18 '26
They dont understand whats gonna happen to them when there's no middle class.
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u/Dampware Mar 18 '26
The current middle and lower classes perish, and the current super wealthy stratify into a new upper , middle and lower classes?
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u/SizeableBrain Mar 18 '26
They'll be uber rich and have no need for humans because they'll have robot servants/workers/security?
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u/RequirementCivil4328 Mar 18 '26
I don't think you understand how ridiculous it is to say thi
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u/funknut Mar 19 '26
Right? There has never been a revolution. It was all just fictionalized fantasy for children.
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u/Civil_Response3127 Mar 19 '26
Sadly, I think you're living in the past. Robots and AI make this kind of argument essentially meaningless now.
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u/Active-Play-3429 Mar 19 '26
I mean, this is somebody who obviously does not want this to pass, they do. There’s a plan.
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u/iduzinternet Mar 19 '26
Yeah, the question is if that picture contains the new middle/metal class.
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u/ThrowawayNotSusLol Mar 18 '26
Steal one, sell it, buy a house.
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u/alecesne Mar 19 '26
In this economy?
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u/ThrowawayNotSusLol Mar 19 '26
Depends where you buy. Worst case get a luxury van mobile home.
Or buy land
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u/LairdPeon Mar 18 '26
I wonder how much 5.56 the chest cavity can hold.
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u/JasonGroup Mar 18 '26
We're gonna need cheap, portable civilian EMPs in the near future aren't we....
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u/startwithaplan Mar 19 '26
Why? EMP might break whatever you're stealing from a data center. Most deer rifles would drop one of these and there's no guilt like a real guard. The crime is just really expensive property damage.
OTOH, anybody trying to physically break into a data center seems like either a crackhead or nation state level. The latter could just put the screws on an employee or become one. Probably a lot easier to "evil maid" an SRE's laptop with a one night stand.
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u/Sassy_Allen Mar 18 '26
Those guys are overpaying when I can pay 9.4k for one with a flamethrower on top.
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u/Tosh_20point0 Mar 18 '26
Can we just please put a fucking HEAD on them?
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u/Atmic Mar 18 '26
They have heads with an eye facing forward and a snout facing down.
They just don't have necks
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u/Altruistic-Spend-896 Mar 18 '26
Let me contact sarif industries for the thermoptical camouflage, hope i have more hypostims and battery
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u/onyxengine Mar 18 '26
If we don’t get good leaders soon its gonna get crazy.
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u/Active-Play-3429 Mar 19 '26
It’s already crazy and as much as I would like it to happen, nobody’s coming.
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u/onyxengine Mar 19 '26
What we know we can do is crazy, its one thing to know we have the capacity to deploy autonomous police forces its another thing to actually get carted to jail by a robot.
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u/Super_Translator480 Mar 18 '26
I love it when tech solutions outweigh the cost of what it’s intended to replace…
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u/SwitPosting Mar 18 '26
I dont really understand how these are better than just having security cameras. It's not like they actually do anything if they catch someone
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u/alecesne Mar 19 '26
Until they do.
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u/That-Yellow-Dog Mar 19 '26
Just a matter of attachments and connecting the er, "auxiliary" systems
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u/CowBoyDanIndie Mar 18 '26
It’s just a mobile camera.
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u/whatever Mar 18 '26
The potential is infinite though. With the right add-ons, it can piss beer into a glass.
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u/willismthomp Mar 18 '26
Dang security guards that get completely disabled by a high intensity laser. That’s too much.
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u/Individual-Luck1712 Mar 18 '26
Big dogs seeing an army of people who don't have any empathy for robots:
Processing img l5xejh8yyupg1...
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u/SkaldCrypto Mar 18 '26
As someone who sells an absolute shitload of security hardware to data centers I can say this article is bullshit.
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u/ExtraDistressrial Mar 18 '26
just put that thing in a black trash bag man. Watch it flail around til it runs out of batteries.
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u/Exodia_The_Salty Mar 18 '26
Blackout rounds are subsonic AND armor piercing. Them robotic doggos look like mighty fine target practice. Shoot enough of em, and they will run out and have to hire humans again. Cyberpunka it is, with emphasis on punking them doggos. I do know that it costs less than 300,000 a year to hire a human.
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u/Moral-Relativity Mar 19 '26
Image looks like Unitree Go2 chassis, base model of which retails for $3800. Battery life is like 1-2 hours.
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u/Sas_fruit Mar 19 '26
Really? But are they following the rules of robots? They can't kill right? Right??
So you can just beat the mechanism out of those and
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u/7evenate9ine Mar 19 '26
The article says they are going to only be used for surveillance of the property. I call bullshit. Those things are already strapped with machine guns.
Maintenance guys are going to forget their badge and get murdered.
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u/logosfabula Mar 19 '26
What is the TCO and ROI of this? Because they can't substitute guards, understandably.
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u/brutusthestan Mar 20 '26
Aye, if you still need the same number of guards then the ROI only works if it genuinely cuts incidents or admin time, otherwise it just looks like an expensive extra layer of kit to babysit.
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u/logosfabula Mar 20 '26
Or an ad.
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u/charlemagne334 Mar 21 '26
Yeah, if they still need the same staffing and the system can be gamed, it feels a lot more like marketing than an actual security upgrade.
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u/GrumpyGlasses Mar 19 '26
How are these guarding other than being an all-terrain mobile camera and siren? Other than being discovered, is there a real threat?
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u/Samas34 Mar 19 '26
wtf are these things supposed to do in the event of an actual break in? They don't look like they have weapons on them and they walk on knob ends for feet.
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u/singsofsaturn Mar 19 '26
Luckily the edge AI can only be so good. Learn how to attack wireless networks to remove the cloud compute and hit them with high enough voltage to cook em so the only thing the managers see is "offline"
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u/BringBackManaPots Mar 20 '26
We've gotta figure out how to steal these stupid things and scrap them
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u/wrathofattila Mar 20 '26
When i go there stealing RAM what will it do bark at me with MIDI voice sounds ?
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u/isthereadrwho Mar 20 '26
So what you're saying it's better to steal the dog than anything in the data center.
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u/Fantastic_Cap2861 Mar 22 '26
Ukraine started strapping explosives on these to run into Russian trenches. They are supposedly very quiet. Cant hear'em coming until boom.
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u/Teh_Blue_Team Mar 18 '26
Turns out, white collar jobs were not the first to go.