As I sat on the porch the other night awash in an Iron Triangle Gold dream, the stars gazing back at me, my mind wandered back to promises of my youth. My memory was jogged by a jet plane out of Houston drifting northward slowly across the sky, reminding me of the flying car promise from days of yore, not really a promise but an aspiration of the good life prophesied for the future.

As the jet lurched forward enough to the point when the sound caught up, it jarred me back from my dream state, back to the reality of what seems like the present day anti-enlightenment. There are no flying cars and we still struggle for world peace, another broken dream of my youth. Instead of the fantastical flying car as a harbinger of the utopia that may have been, we get this:

Robot dog with machine gun hints of a dystopian future

While Boston Dynamics show off their robot’s dance moves, others turn similar-looking devices into dystopian killing machines.

Much like their flesh-made cousins, robot dogs do not lack attention on the internet. Many have seen the footage of Spot, a high-tech quadruped developed by the US-based company Boston Dynamics, flaunting its dance moves.

However, the latest addition to the robot dog content stream looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Twitter user Sean Chiplock shared a video of someone in Russia firing a gun from a quadruped robot.

Even though the post’s author discusses robots Boston Dynamics make, the one seen in the video is not made by the American company. As Sean Gallagher, a Senior Threat Researcher at Sophos points out, the robot dog is of Chinese origin.