Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
ARLINGTON, Texas — A robot dog approached a man outside AT&T Stadium last week, tilted its head, and glowed a soft blue. The man did what any Texan does when confronted by the future: he shot it. No, not really. In this case, he did the second-most obvious thing and filmed it for viral content. By morning, the clip was everywhere, captioned with the claim that the dog was scanning faces to check tickets.
Boston Dynamics took issue with this assertion. “The robots do not have facial recognition,” a spokesperson said. Instead, it utilizes a toolkit that includes, but is not limited to, a 360-degree camera, thermal imaging, directional microphones, and software that identifies people by the way they walk. Boston Dynamics appears not to have realized that their humblebrag actually sounds far more invasive than facial recognition.
They can also dance. Boston Dynamics’ most-watched videos show its robots dancing: tight, cheerful routines to Motown that pulled in tens of millions of views and groomed an entire generation to find the machines adorable years before they were deployed in the field like some kind of creepy Black Mirror homage. While on the clock, not dancing, the robot dog can be found standing very still outside Gate 4, waiting to see whether your ambient body temperature suggests you might be guilty of pre-crime.
In 2017, Black Mirror aired an episode in which robot dogs of roughly this size were built to hunt the last surviving humans in the aftermath of a robot apocalypse. It’s the kind of thing that comes to mind when one of them tilts its head at you and glows in real life.
The man who filmed the robot dog has not been identified. Identifying him would require facial recognition, which the dog does not have. His walk, however, is presumably on file,
