Oh laugh. Laugh all you want. When that break dancing robot eats a mouthful of pavement. When robo-Olaf short circuits and ruins a Disneyland vacation. Get your licks in now buddy, because once Eric Trump’s totally real robot army is up and running we’ll see who gets the last laugh.
According to a report from WIRED, a recent startup is building the army of the future. Specifically the future from 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Foundation Future Industries is a company developing humanoid robots for combat. While military robotics contracts are common and the battlefield is overrun with a variety of terrifying drones, what separates Foundation is that these killer bipeds are their flagship focus. The other distinctive element about Foundation is their chief strategy advisor: Eric Trump, son of Donald.
“People don’t realize he actually is an engineer at heart,” Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak tells WIRED, “so he does a lot of milling and things like that at his home.” While Trump told Fox News the company secured a $24 million dollar contract from the Pentagon, Pathak is more cagey about whether his involvement has secured any new specific funding from the White House.
Humanoid androids make for good Starlog covers and pirate rides, but robotics experts have long criticized the pursuit of human-shaped robotics. Replicating human walking and running patterns for a variety of terrain is notoriously difficult to engineer.
MIT’s Rodney Brooks tells WIRED we are likely a decade plus away from a bipedal robot that could safely navigate a door frame. Replacing human boots on the ground with metal ones may not be as efficient as wheels, treads or airborne drones. The juvenile pursuit of humanoid robots have long been a grievance for YouTuber Angela Collier, who bemoans the fantasy of robot waiters and janitors over the more purpose-built ketchup bottles or Roombas.
As Collier illustrates, these pitches are usually little more than fishing for contracts and investment. People are familiar and captivated by robots as seen in film, and anything that closely matches those fictions deserves incredible scrutiny. It’s very Trump-brand to pursue the most bombastic method, regardless of practicality. Ideally we just don’t have any killer robots roaming around, regardless of legs. At the time of writing, we should be most concerned for the kids getting roundhouse kicked by automatons that weren’t supposed to do that.