The Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities last week heralded the hiring of “Aurora,” a Boston Dynamics “Spot” model robot, to patrol the runways of the Fairbanks International Airport in diguise as a fox or coyote and chase geese and other migratory birds the fuck away from planes before they can get pureed by jet engines, the Anchorage Daily News reports.
Alaska DOT program manager Alex Marlow told a joint session of the state legislature last week that the “sole purpose of this [robo K9] is to act as a predator, and allow for us to invoke that response in wildlife without having to use other means.” Later Marlow told the Daily News that the DOT – tasked with preventing another goose crash like the one that took down an AWAC out of nearby Elmendorf Air Force Base that killed 24 service members in 1995 – had tried some other ideas like spraying grape juice from aerial drones. “We decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to spray in these areas because we didn’t know what animals are attracted to grape juice… and how safe is it having these massive drones at an airport,” Marlow said. So they settled on the undercover robo K9.
And yes, it would appear that Yahoo News is algorithmically serving stories about Boston Dynamics robo K9s to National Zero based on our browsing history. We got that. We still took the bait.