You know how there are certain stories that keep you up in the middle of the night? Maybe it was a ghost story someone told you when you were ten, or maybe it’s a movie scene that scared the daylights out of you as a kid. Want to know what keeps me up in the early hours of the morning? The fact that the American Military once created a robot that can eat people.
Sadly, you read that correctly. Technically, they created a robot that can consume “organisms” for fuel so that it didn’t have to run on a battery or carry a fuel tank around, but I think we all know what “organisms” means.
In 2009, the poor company making these robots for the military thought that this was a spectacular idea, and in theory it is. A robot that can consume something from the environment around it to keep moving is going to be able to go further and last longer than a robot that can run out of battery life or fuel.
Because humans are constantly on edge about multiple sorts of ways the world could end (nuclear war, zombies, climate change), we immediately heard that robots could eat people now and assumed it was the beginning of the robot apocalypse.
If the baboon apocalypse sounds like more fun, listen to the GOAT Team chat about Sydney’s great baboon escape…
In one of the most bizarre statements that the US military has probably ever had to make, they came out and assured us all that the organism eating robot was a vegetarian and definitely wouldn’t eat people. It would be feasting on plants only, and not the corpses of people who had died in war zones.
“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” said Harry Schoell, the chief executive of one of the companies that helped make the robots.
Look, as much as I wish I was assured that the robots aren’t coming to eat me in my sleep so they can use me as fuel, I’m really not. It’s been eleven years since they were first announced, but I’m still haunted by these damn machines.
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