We have good and bad news about that video of the robot dog firing a gun

Have you watched the video where a robot dog fires an assault rifle? Good and bad news for me.

The bad news is that it is probably a dangerous toy.

The video was uploaded by Alexander Atamanov, the founder of a Russian hoverbike company. It looks like a gun strapped to an existing Unitree dogBot is what the bot is. It is not clear if the bot shoots the gun or not. He may have just put together a few things he liked into a new toy.

Image via Facebook

I don't know why I think so. Taking a close look at the high-res image from Facebook, you can see that the bot has a white wolf patch on it. His last name is atamanov.

Image via Facebook

The founder posted a video of himself at the range with a gun that looked almost identical to the one on the bot, and with the exact same patch on his shoulder. He posted a picture of himself playing with a Unitree robot, only holding a coffee cup, a month before he posted the dog-robot video.

He likes to play with military equipment on his Facebook page. It seems more likely that he slapped a couple of his interests together, and less likely, because of how impractical this gun-dog combination is.

Image via Facebook

The company behind the AK-47 is one of the competitors of this guy.

Atamanov didn't reply immediately.

The good news is that a robot dog has a gun.

If you see a video of a dog shooting a fully automatic weapon, you're going to be scared. A better time to be worried might have been last October, when a company announced a robot dog with a gun.

Image: Sword International

When it was revealed last September that Iran's top nuclear scientist was assassinated by a killer robot that was remote controlled by a sniper over 1,000 miles away, there was another possibility.

The French army began testing Boston Dynamics' robot dog Spot in combat scenarios without any obvious dog-mounted weaponry.

Small drones and robot without dog legs get equipped with weaponry. The world is coming to the realization that the technology exists to turnrobots into deadly weapons and that they could begin killing autonomously if they haven't already begun. At this point, dog or no, it seems like it will happen.

I admit that there is something bad about man's best friend turning on us. Every time we see a dog get a new ability like opening a door, it makes me wonder how the movie will play out.