Okay, I’ll admit I’m a teensy bit paranoid. I’ll also admit I love teh teknologee. And what I watched yesterday profoundly disturbed me. [EDIT: I tried to embed a YouTube video here, but I obviously haven't got it all worked out yet. Just go with the link; it will open in a new window.] Herewith, the Big Dog, developed by Boston Dynamics.

First, it’s kinda eerie watching a robot that resembles two skinny athletes stuck in a metal carapace with one of them constantly having to walk backwards, but if you can get past that, then the engineering is wondrous. That’s the only way I can put it. Having done Artificial Intelligence as part of my Computer Science degree, I have an inkling (or even a nano-kling, when I consider how out-of-date that little piece of education was) of what it would be like to design and program a robot such as the Big Dog and boy, am I damned impressed. Damned impressed! However … (if it’s a blog of mine, you knew there’d be an “however” there somewhere, didn’t you?). Well, let’s compare it to a real mule (the sterile horse-donkey hybrid) and see.

1. Cost. According to Boston Dynamics, the Big Dog was developed as a “mule” for soldiers, to help carry equipment in inhospitable terrain. I shudder to think how much the Big Dog cost to develop, and all that money for nothing more than a mule? I mean, come on people. You could drop actual mules into inhospitable terrain and have the animals function better than the Big Dog. How much does a mule cost? Maybe several hundred per animal (? I’ll admit I’m guessing here), almost self-replicating if you do your planning right. Whereas … well, I don’t know how much the Big Dog costs, but I doubt you’ll find it on special at K-mart for even a paltry $9,999.00, and they don’t make Tiny Puppies in their spare time.
2. Maintenance. The real mule needs some maintenance, of course, but it has pay-offs. You can form an affinity with the animal, and get it to exceed its capabilities for short periods of time if trust has been developed, for example. If push came to shove, you could keep your team alive by eating it. You can’t eat the Big Dog and it would probably be a bitch to maintain in the field. And who knows what its weight tolerances are?
3. Weight distribution. Did you notice the four packs of gear that the Big Dog was carrying? The things that make it resemble a mutant from “The Fly”? For optimal function, they would have to be evenly distributed over the robot. And if you’ve been anywhere near the military, you’d know that the weight distribution of your accompanying Big Dog would take precedence over even seeing to your own sustenance or hygiene needs, for example. Seems a lot of trouble to go to for nothing more than a hideously expensive robot. The real mule, admittedly, also needs some load-balancing, and I have no data on the relative load-balancing “intelligence” of a mule versus a Big Dog, so we might just call that one a draw.
4. The payload of the Big Dog. According to the video, the weight of the Big Dog is 235lbs (106.8kg) and its payload capacity is 340lbs (154.5kg). Mules weigh from 210kg to 400kg, according to Wikipedia. From a thread on the carrying capacity of mules:
   

   A light load for a mule is up to 230 pounds [100kg]; a medium load, 231-460 pounds [105-209kg]; and a heavy load, 461-690 pounds [209-314kg]. A mule can drag 3,450 pounds [1,568kg].

   So, right there, even allowing for a generous margin of error, a real mule trounces the Big Dog.

5. Noise. Yep, real mules make noise, but have you heard that buzzing, like a silencer on a chain-saw coming out of the Big Dog? I’m sure Boston Dynamics have done something with it since but, on a quiet day, I bet you’ll still hear it coming.

So, if it makes no sense to have a robot mule when there are cheaper, organic alternatives around, what could it possibly be used for? And the idea, even before I knew the Big Dog’s intended use or who funded Boston Dynamic’s research, flashed in my head as the video unrolled.

Imagine, if you will, hostile, enemy terrain. You want to clear the area, but you don’t want to use your own soldiers to do it. Wouldn’t it be so very very easy to equip a Big Dog with a ring of motion and infrared sensors, mounted weaponry on each corner, and snakes of ammunition in the packs below? Watch the Big Dog delicately manoeuvre over piles of urban-like rubble, and jump agilely over the equivalent of small walls, and tell me that I’m in Cloud Cuckoo Land on this one. If any civilians get killed in the cross-fire, the Big Dog has the advantage of being a robot, and you’re not going to put a robot on trial, are you? Besides, robots don’t take incriminating photos of other robots doing nasty things to people, or blog about it afterwards, so there’s another complication nipped in the bud right there. And robots, sure as hell, don’t do things like this. The solution to all this embarrassment is quite militarily elegant when you think about it.

It may be that I’m really reaching here because I’m such a science-fiction lovin’ geekgirl at heart and maybe I’ve watched the Terminator movies a few too many times for my own mental health, but the final frame really stayed with me for a while:

Big Dog is a product of Boston Dynamics, with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Have a nice day, folks.