Old snake hips, Mick Jagger, has met his robotic match. Boston Dynamics has released a tribute to The Rolling Stones’ iconic music video for their 1981 hit “Start Me Up,” with band members replaced by the company’s quadrupedal Spot robots.
It is, as with most things Boston Dynamics, either:
- cool
- creepy
- a harbinger of a terrible future in which people are hunted in the streets by robot dogs armed with knives
- a harbinger of a wonderful future in which people, I don’t know, go to a dance party with robot dogs?
Just take your pick and please don’t mention that Black Mirror episode. You know the one I mean. At this point, everybody has made the same comparison and nobody cares.
More prosaically, this video is both a demonstration of Spot’s impressive mobility and of Boston Dynamics’ ongoing desire to make its robots seem fun. The company has a bit of a PR problem, in that its wares are so closely associated with robot quadrupeds, that when some totally unrelated company straps a gun onto a totally unrelated four-legged robot, people on social media still shout that “those sickos at Boston Dynamics have got to go!”
Video by Reuters
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