#They're overhyped in articles and promotions because it's tech of course they are

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I don’t normally do this because I hate making additions to long posts but hi, I actively work with one of these robotic dogs and while I cannot speak on behalf of Boston Dynamics as a company, I can give more context for the actual machine and explain that this post is very much fearmongering.

I work with a Boston Dynamics Spot 2.0 model, if I’m not mistaken, they’re onto their 3.0 model now. Ours was a donation to our center to help teach kids AI and robotics. We run a multitude of demonstrations with it including a workshop where we get into the nitty gritty of how it’s AI works. 

The Spot series was built as an all terrain camera, essentially. They’re primarily being used by search and rescue as well as fire fighters because it can get into areas humans can’t. And they’re used in industrial settings. The issue? The Spot series is incredibly fragile for something that’s meant to be a durable robot. And it has an incredibly finnicky AI. Ours FREAKS out and stops being able to respond to proper commands if it’s near a disco ball because it utilizes light as part of it’s sensor array to move. A disco ball scattering light across the floor comes across on it’s cameras as a mess and it stops being able to walk in a straight line. It also has quite a bit of wear and tear. Because of how often ours does it’s shows and demonstrations, despite only being a few years old, it has needed to be shipped back to Boston to get fixed because it’s legs will just crap out on it.

Speaking of legs, going back up this post to the pinch points, yes, every single machine that does any kind of complex movement, so, basically any industrial machinery, has pinch points. They’re points of rotation and primary movement and if you stuck your hand into it, it would hurt you. You also wouldn’t stick your hand or loose clothes and hanging jewelry into an active conveyor belt would you? 

It took our science center hundreds of photos and training our Spot 2.0 AI for weeks to teach it to recognize a single rubber chicken in a rainbow sweater to be able to go and find it without controller assistance. And there’s still a fairly substantial chance that when instructed to go and find it, it will instead walk up to some other object. Why? Because from the groaning, complaining, and commiserating of it’s programmers on our team, it is a very dumb machine. It runs off of Python. For anyone who knows anything about coding, Python is a coding language that literally anyone can learn. Which means anyone with a background in Python can build systems to teach it. Except it’s a coding system and as any programmer will tell you, it will fucking break for no reason or for the dumbest reasons. It can’t calculate for every scenario. It would take the military an ungodly amount of time and resources to try and teach one of these things to detect enemies with ANY accuracy and there would still be a very large percentage chance that it could fail at that task. The human behind the controller makes up for a lot of it’s failings, issue is, that means you need someone constantly on it’s controller.

Even when we turn it’s auto detection and complex systems off and have it entirely on manual drive, it is and always will be, limited by the fact that it’s a piece of machinery that fails, regularly. And even on top of that, it can’t do much when it does succeed.

It has a top speed of around 3mph, it cannot jump due to a lack of vertical detection in it’s AI, and it only weighs around 70lbs with most of that weight coming from the lithium ion battery pack you plug into it’s stomach to power it. The battery only has about enough juice to go for 60 minutes before it dies and if you’re running it pretty hard and making it do a lot, that battery will drain much much faster. If you want to disable a Spot 2.0, all you need to do is damage the controller. If it doesn’t have the remote, it can’t do anything. Now, supposedly, the controller can work to run the machine up to a football field away, but we’ve never tested that to know if it’s accurate. And all of this is with an older Spot model. The current Spot models run for around 150k if I’m not mistaken.

Now, all of this isn’t to say “trust the cops with complex machinery and trust the military” no, absolutely not fuck those pigs. But don’t start conjuring up the fear that you need to be keeping a sledgehammer in your home to protect yourself from Spot units in the near future. As it currently stands, aside from dramatized television shows, a human will win in any contest against a Spot unit for so many reasons. The power button is on the back “butt” panel of the machine, if you cover it’s cameras, of which there are four, it can no longer function, it can’t outrun or chase you, and in order to actually function remotely without a majority of it’s motions being controlled via, well, the controller, it would need so much time and training on a finnicky and highly breakable coding system that it’s almost laughable. 

You could beat a Spot unit if two or more people ran at one and spray painted over it’s cameras, pressed the button on it’s ass, flipped it over, and pulled out it’s battery. And it would take you less then five minutes. Hell, if you stuck a piece of long wire through the fan grate on it, it would also just straight up die. You don’t need a sledgehammer. You just need to move fast.