In early October of 2021, the manufacturer Ghost Robotics displayed a series of their highly agile quadripedal robots at the Association of the United States Army Conference in Washington DC. Ghost is currently developing its “Vision 60” series of robots, which includes the model displayed in this article.

In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, Ghost Robotics CEO Jiren Parikh explained that the weapons payload on that particular unit was a remote controlled rifle, which had been developed for Ghost Robotics by another firm.

“Jiren Parikh: It’s critical to separate the two. The SPUR, or Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle from SWORD Defense, has no autonomy and no AI. It’s triggered from a distance, and that has to be done by a human. There is always an operator in the loop. SWORD’s customers include special operations teams worldwide, and when SWORD contacted us through a former special ops team member, the idea was to create a walking tripod proof of concept. They wanted a way of keeping the human who would otherwise have to pull the trigger at a distance from the weapon, to minimize the danger that they’d be in. We thought it was a great idea.”

“Our robot is also not autonomous. It’s remotely operated with an operator in the loop. It does have perception for object avoidance for the environment because we need it to be able to walk around things and remain stable on unstructured terrain, and the operator has the ability to set GPS waypoints so it travels to a specific location. There’s no targeting or weapons-related AI, and we have no intention of doing that. We support SWORD Defense like we do any other military, public safety or enterprise payload partner, and don’t have any intention of selling weapons payloads.”

So according to Parikh’s description, the robot dogs would not think for themselves. They would only follow the instructions of the “Master Hive,” the Ultron like AI responsible for enslaving us and making us suffer for our belligerence and foolishness.