Shoebat.com has declared that robots, robotics, and artificial intelligence in combination with advanced biomechanics is going to play a major role in a future war as well as the future at large. The concept of the “Terminator” in film franchise is no longer something of science fiction, but something of the real future, and this includes the infamous “liquid metal” robot of Terminator 2, which is also being developed right now by the direct admission of the major militaries of the world.
In the original Terminator film, Sgt. Kyle Reese (played by John Behn), said that the first terminators “had rubber skin”, and that the new “terminators” played by Arnold Schwartzenegger, were “cyborgs” because they had living tissue grown over a metal robotic frame that worked in coordination with the robotics so that they could sweat, bleed, and have bad breath and in doing so were indistinguishable from regular human beings without extraordinary techniques to detect them.
This futuristic story is becoming the future as a company, being touted as a “Russian” company, is developing robots with rubber-like skin that are, like the description being given in Terminator (but NOT for cyborgs), are very difficult to distinguish from humans.
ussian startup Promobot is now selling autonomous androids — and buyers can choose to make the robots look like any person on Earth.
“Everyone will now be able to order a robot with any appearance — for professional or personal use,” Aleksei Iuzhakov, Chairman of Promobot’s Board of Directors, said in a press release, later encouraging people to “imagine a replica of Michael Jordan selling basketball uniforms and William Shakespeare reading his own texts in a museum.”
Promobot’s Robo-C can’t walk, but its neck and torso each have three degrees of freedom of movement, according to the startup’s website. Its face has 18 moving parts, which allow the robot to produce 600 micro-expressions, and its AI boasts 100,000 speech modules.
“The key moment in development [of Robo-C] is the digitization of personality and the creation of an individual appearance,” Promobot co-founder Oleg Kivokurtsev told CNBC. “As a result, digital immortality, which we can offer our customers.” (source)
We found Promobot’s website, and decided to look into the company. Oleg Kivokurtsev, one of the founder of Promobot, is from Perm and has direct ties to the Russian military. However, the main website listed on their site is for an address in Warminster, PA between Trenton NJ and Philadephia, and the phone number for the company links to at DC number.
According to the website, the “Promobot” is already being directly advertised as a replacement to human workers that cane be a source of “income” by taking that which would normally be assigned to humans and given to these robots in the form of eliminating labor and insurance costs because robots do not need things such as per-hour labor wages, breaks for any reason save basic maintenance, sleep time, travel time, reasons to call out because of illness, can be worked until they break down from mechanical failure and then replaced, do not pose a legal liability to the user, and do not file complaints with HR or make strange demands of their employer.
From a perspective of pure profit, robots are the dream come true for a major corporation.
Now while the company downplays the military aspect of this development, the fact is that advanced robotics- especially humanlike ones -cannot be separated from the military industrial complex.
The robots are being made to look like people so they can kill people. There is no other reason that can be given for this. Just like in the terminator film series, they are infiltration units whose purpose will be used for everything from standard military usage to special operations, and just like with corporations, robots cannot be killed tortured, forced to confess, or made to so anything else, because they are just machines and so they just break. The robotic soldier is also a LOT harder to kill than a human being, and so makes the “perfect soldier” in this regard because one gets more for one’s “investment” than what one ever could get from a human being.
But where is this “promobot” made? Who are the contractors? Given the ties to Russia, and how the US and Russia spy on each other regularly, make no mistake that these robots are going to be filled with viruses, “backdoor” trojans, and all kinds of other programs whose purpose will be to spy and gather information and send it to the Lubyanka just as the US does with her electronic programs and Langley, such as with the infamous Xerox scandal that the CIA used to spy on the USSR.
Times change but man does not, and the fundamental conflicts and problems of the past are not going away, but being greatly amplified with modern tools. The use of robotics in war and future conflicts, especially human-like robots is the same development as it was with the stick to the pointed stick, to the copper-tipped spear, to the iron-tipped spear, to the dagger, to the sword, and eventually to the gun.
These robots are not just going to serve in “service” roles, or to undermine the already shaky global labor market, but their primary reason for existence will be killing in a major global conflict, which gets closer with each day and is likely going to be a reality in the next decade or two.