Lean, Mean, Green, Fighting Machine

“A humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing on Sunday ran faster than the human world record.” This, it turns out, is not the biggest (or scariest) robot news of the week. NYT (Gift Article): The Killer Robots Are Coming. The Battlefield Will Never Look the Same. “The robots charged into battle through a valley in eastern Ukraine, driving over grass toward a Russian position. Essentially little green wagons, they looked like something you might buy at a garden store to move bags of soil around. But each carried 66 pounds of explosives. As the remotely controlled vehicles approached the enemy soldiers, an aerial drone flew in and dropped a bomb to help clear a path. One of the robots then rushed in and blew itself up, while the others held back, monitoring the position. A sheet of cardboard appeared above a trench. ‘We want to surrender,’ it read.” (I hold up the same message to my laptop like three times a week.)