John Rush

People will say, is this bad? The robots are going to kill us. And I said, oh, and then they're going to raise a $500 million seed round. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not. That's kind of a joke. But the idea is that we've seen so many of these humanoid robots and AI startups. We've seen a lot of people doing cruise missiles and things that would have been controversial 10 years ago.

And now all the planets are aligning to create basically the Terminator company, which would be, you know, completely controversial and like a lightning rod, which could be very good for getting attention and breaking through if you're a new startup. Now there's the question about like, do we actually need this? Is this the right thing for a lot of companies?

use cases like no you don't want a humanoid robot you want a tank or you want a plane or something um but uh but for some maybe the teleoperation makes sense you know like we like why put a human at risk in you know like when we went in to get osama bin laden we sent in navy seals they got in a helicopter it was a very dangerous mission and if they could have been running that mission

remotely from a warehouse and just doing teleoperation, but doing everything that they did, but it's just robots. So even if they got shot, nothing would happen. Basically you die and you just immediately respawn like Call of Duty. That sounds like an improvement. It sounds dystopian and scary in many ways, but at the same time, The progress arrow of the future might just move in this direction.

And it seems like something that if you really think deeply about what will the world look like in 50 years, clearly the technology, it will be possible to build a humanoid robot that holds a gun. And so why wouldn't it happen? What are the forces that would stop that from happening?

And if you can't think of any good reasons why it wouldn't happen, then, well, maybe we're on the path to it happening, and maybe we ought to grapple with that. And interestingly, Boston Dynamics has actually somewhat explored this

uh years ago so boston dynamics is the company that does those incredible viral videos with the the spot robot it looks like a dog and then the atlas robot that can do parkour and they've been working on this for decades and the company has changed hands a few times google owned it at one point i think hyundai bought it for a while and it's moved around but it's always been a company that wasn't particularly focused on government contracting and defense contracting um but

Back in 2013 or 2012, 2013, I was living with this hacker guy who went on their website and figured out how to scrape all the files from their website, even the ones that weren't necessarily like fully public. Like they were public, but they just weren't like actually shown to people on the website. They were just like hosted there.

And one of them was a sketch artist of their humanoid robot holding a gun. And so it was very clear that they had at least someone in their organization at least like pitched it to the government and said like, Hey, like we could maybe do this. And then I think someone was like, we're not doing that. But, but they have this one humanoid robot called Petman.

And it was designed, you got to pull up a video or image of this because it's crazy. Because the stated mission of Petman was to test the mobility of equipment to prevent like gas attacks. So imagine you need to wear like essentially a space suit on the battlefield to avoid like some terrible biological attack or some gas. So it's a gas mask, but it's also a body suit.

and you make the suit and then you need to put it through its paces. So you literally like paces, like you need to have it be like, yes, we put this on a human and the human ran for a hundred miles. And so we know it's not gonna break after a hundred miles of usage.

could do stuff just like putting in a washing machine just beat it up and see if it holds its like it doesn't break or get leaks but putting it on a humanoid robot and just having the robot walk there for you know 10 miles or 100 miles is a pretty good way to test this stuff and so that's what they were using that for but there was no reason i mean you see this thing it's just super militarized and you just think like okay like this is where this going and every time that there's a boston dynamics video that drops everyone always says like these things are gonna have guns on them eventually

And some people have put guns on them and the corridor crew, this wonderful YouTube channel has actually done like a CGI version where they had the Boston, they call it boss town dynamics. And they, and they had a whole version of like training them with guns. But basically all of the, all of the clues are pointing to this, this happening.

And it just feels like someone's going to put the pieces together that the tech exists and And this would be massively viral and controversial and get me a ton of attention, which could be good. It could be bad, but I could at least harness it. And so I think someone's going to do it. Maybe they're listening right now.

Yeah, it is interesting. Will it be an arm of Tesla? Elon is already a defense contractor with SpaceX, but he hasn't built ICBMs, even though he builds rockets. Or Anduril has a lot of capabilities, and they build autonomous weapon systems now, and so they could build something like this. But my original take on Twitter was more just like,

the vibes are coalescing around the idea that this will be something that people will talk about if it happens and all the pieces are there for the demo at least and yeah maybe it's tele-operated maybe it's a very niche use case and honestly like yeah giving it a gun is probably not even the most valuable thing i mean still search and rescue just going into the nuclear reactor when it's melting down or you know going into the burning building

Like, you know, teleoperation for, you know, the firefighter gets out of the truck and is like, okay, I'm going to virtually, I'm going to put on my VR headset and the robot's going to walk in and rescue the kitten. Like, that makes a ton of sense. And maybe that's the first thing. But yeah, I mean, we are...

coming to the era of like it is believable that there will be a robot with a gun somewhere in the world in the next couple decades and somebody's going to be building that and that's just interesting to think about you know is it good is it bad there's a lot of things you could you could work through um there will be a lot of regulations a lot of rules and you know what does the geneva convention say about it and i'm sure we'll have a big debate and there'll be lots of you know editorial pieces and op-eds but uh

The tech is here.

Well, I just started a new podcast called Technology Brothers. It's a weekly chat show with me and a friend. We just talk about the news of the week. Very casual, but very cinematic. We're having a lot of fun with it. And then I do have a YouTube channel, just my name, John Coogan. And I put up video essays and documentaries about tech and business and politics and all sorts of stuff.