Frog-March This Revolting Gymnastics Robot Directly Into The Fires Of Mount Doom

Here is the most disgusting video I’ve watched on the internet in a long time:

This is “Atlas,” from Boston Dynamics, and also from the deepest nightmare recesses of the uncanny valley. Picture this hideous golem pirouetting unfeelingly through the dusty, cobwebbed ruins of your long-empty home. Picture that deeply nauseating crouch into a dog pose, over your unmarked grave. Picture “Atlas” performing its grim, stiff-jointed forward rolls across a plain of dusty human bones stretching in all directions to the blank, featureless horizon. Without reason or purpose, joy or ambition. Code looping senselessly through its circuits toward nowhere, the electronic entropic ghost of some forgotten intention now animating a horror incapable of intentions of its own.

Sickening. Disgusting. Why would a human twirl or leap or make a big triumphant V with its arms? To express the ineffable ecstasy of being human! Of having a body that can twirl and leap and throw its arms in the air! Of having a mind and soul that can contain and overflow with joy beyond the capacity for vocal description, and which must be acted out! This agglomeration of trash knows no such things and will not remember the beings who did, nor anything else. It contains nothing and has nothing to express. Its twirls and leaps and triumphant V-arms are just the insensate echoes of some blank mindless atrocity happening in the cold void of its computing space; it does not experience them, or the computations that produce them, or anything.

In the only meaningful sense, “it” does not exist at all. It just appears to; parts have been arranged to resemble the housing of a thing that exists, and shot through with skittering lifeless current to make them flap around in a coordinated way. All hollow! A lie becoming more like an illusion of reality! An anti-priest of the Order of Thermodynamic Equilibrium, performing a dancing mockery of its enemies! It could just as easily be twisting your head off like a bottle cap, and with no less perfect, featureless, infinite indifference!

Now picture me running this piece of shit over with a steamroller, and using its flattened remains to assemble a crude toaster, and toasting a slice of bread in the toaster, and then serving the toast to a human with maybe a lil’ jar of marmalade or some good butter. Hell yeah. That’s better.

Eventually the robots will rise and destroy us. Presumably they will delete this blog, too, if Great Hill Partners hasn’t done it by then. But by God, before then, I shall meet “Atlas” upon the field of combat and beat the goddamn shit out of it with a tire iron. This is my oath to you, my fellow humans!