It's kind of cute how the Roomba moves around your filthy floors, methodically getting every corner and high-traffic area, until the battery dies and it stops in exhaustion because it couldn't make it back to the self-charging station, its red light blinking helplessly, as it calls out in that polite third-person voice, "Please charge Roomba." Please!

And then there's the "BigDog," an evolving series of terrifying robots designed by Boston Dynamics. Early versions of BigDog were impressive enough, with their ability to carry heavy loads through deep mud and across icy slopes. And when that video of someone kicking BigDog hit the Internet several years ago, you could [...]

"Three of the U.S. military's newest recruits reported for duty this week at the Army Test and Evaluation Command. These troops are different from normal soldiers in several ways—for starters, each has six feet. And they are robots designed to look and move like cockroaches." —Sometimes it seems like DARPA and Boston Robotics are just fucking with us, doesn't it? They've made a flea robot, too. I can't wait for the bedbug one.

"With faster than human speed, this is a step in the development of a high speed killer that could negotiate a battlefield quickly to hunt and kill. The biggest concern about this is that no artificial intelligence system can distinguish between civilians and enemy combatants, and so if this was operating on its own it would fall foul of the laws of war." —Great! The military has designed robots that can move faster than we can run away from them. Just in case the swarms of quadrotor drones that are coming fail to annihilate us. (I like the part in that video where the robot cheetah trips [...]