Skip to main content

An American engineering firm called Boston Dynamics is best known for its pack-horse war robot, BigDog, a 110-kilogram, headless quadruped that looks and walks like a kind of angry deer. This machine was designed for the U.S. military for rough terrain and can climb rocky inclines. It can sit down, stand up and, amazingly, right itself if kicked over. In 2013, a version was developed that had an arm that could pick things up and throw them.

When videos of these things first circulated they immediately inspired artists and sci-fi nerds. They are terrifying creatures: big, loud, strong, stupid. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of them is that despite having no head, they seem remarkably determined. They display a dumb stubbornness: The scientists kick them over and they grimly clamber up and keep going. This mindless relentlessness has been an aspect of hunter-killer robots in sci-fi since the Daleks.

Much more recently, a fictitious character that looks a lot like a Boston Dynamics four-legged robot made a glamorous appearance in the new season of Black Mirror, the Netflix series known for its repeated imagining of virtual consciousnesses in digital prisons.

They weren't the first. The German industrial-electronica outfit Amnesia Scanner released a video in 2016 for their composition As Trust. It shows highly processed, psychedelically coloured footage of the BigDog being kicked over and getting up, repeated ad nauseam while the dark and doomy beats and glitches drone. It is an archetype of a certain purely dysphoric musical aesthetic: Its technology is always both nightmarish and cool. Amnesia Scanner's live shows are pitch-black, pierced with blinding strobe flashes and painful blasts of noise. Robot voices often mutter threatening nonsense over the thumps. Scary robots are thrilling.

People saw the Amnesia Scanner video and thought it was great dystopic animation, not actual promotional video made by a proud U.S. company.

The Black Mirror episode inspired by the machine is not the one most commented on in the new season. Most talk has been about the series's "Easter eggs" – passing references to previous shows. These might suggest that all the episodes exist within the same fictitious universe, if at different times in its history.

But the episode called Metalhead has none of these, and is a departure for the show. It is not primarily about the worst possible outcomes of artificial intelligences and neural implants; it is hardly conceptual at all. It is an old-fashioned thriller based on a chase. It shows a barren landscape with a woman called Bella trying to escape a small, four-legged metal robot with no face (she calls it a "dog"). The dog has shot a tracking device into her leg. It chases her through forest and concrete buildings for the rest of the show's short 41 minutes. The dog looks a lot like a Boston Dynamics robot, and has the same gait, but is sleeker and faster. It is a beautifully scary and convincing metal predator – as well-designed and smoothly moving an enemy as any monster since Alien. It "sees" with heat and light sensors. (Lovely strobing effects allow us to see what grainy, throbbing landscapes it sees.)

The episode is shot in a high-definition black-and-white, almost all in a snowy countryside, reinforcing an end-of-the-world grimness.

This robot is violent and dumb. It makes no decisions but hunting and killing. In this it is a very old-fashioned monster, in the vein of a Dalek who only knows the command "Exterminate!" It is quite the opposite of an artificial intelligence. (Apparently, an early script included a remote human operator character, but this character was cut, so we are unsure if the dog is controlled by anything but a programmed instinct.) The whole episode is in a sense a paean to the American military-industrial complex: The gun-metal black robot is so cool one can't help but be proud of its engineer. The show pays homage to remote-controlled weaponry and is a nod to contemporary drone warfare.

But it is also typically bleak: The world has been ruined by these things and no explanation is given but the sense that machinery itself is evil. Unlike other episodes in this series, there is no indication that the technology evolved from some well-intentioned, life-improving/labour-saving software. It represents not the neurotic complexity of technology, but its id.

One wonders if the designers of real war robots such as this have a sense that they are actually contributing to the creation of narrative fiction. I think they do. More recent robots made by Boston Dynamics include the Atlas, a 75-kg bipedal humanoid robot that can run, jump and lift. It can do a back flip from a standing position and land upright on its feet. It is also headless.

Even more deviously artistic is the company's newest creature: a small dog-shaped machine, also headless, called the SpotMini, that can crouch convincingly like the predator in Black Mirror. It is supposedly for "home or office" use. Welcome to your future office, designed by the movies.

Interact with The Globe