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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Lots of commments on military applications, but bipedal robots are inferior to wheel vehicles, planes, and aerial drones, in terms of speed and maneuverability.

Everyone's so afraid of Terminators hunting them down, when in reality, mostly invisible , and mostly silent, Predator drones from a mile away that will kill you with precisely targeted missiles should be your real fear. Or commercial quad-copters carrying anti-personnel mines.

The expense, complexity, power, etc to build bipedal assassins is higher than wheeled RC vehicles, quad copters, and missiles.

The weapons that exist today are much more scary than these robots.

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IIRC the humanoid Terminators in the movie are infiltrator units. Skynet will definitely have more conventional aircrafts and wheeled vehicles to hunt us down.

The conventional aircraft were shown in several Terminator movies, and look like a large drone with two large forward fans and two small rear fans.

Similarly, Terminator 2 showed large tracked vehicles.

It’s called the HK (hunter/killer).

Not to mention the fact that you can hear them from a mile away - there's a reason all ambient noise was replaced with the music ;)

A swarm of these can fan out over a house and target very specifically anyone hiding there. Without killing the human shields.

I know many have seen this, but for those who haven't:

Slaughterbots https://youtu.be/9CO6M2HsoIA

Given the context of OP I was genuinely initially fooled, though the audience reaction and visual effects gave it away. Truly chilling stuff.

Not unless they can make them significantly quieter. What you don't hear under the music in that video is the robot making an awful lot of noise just moving around. The hostage-takers in your scenario will hear them a mile away.

Well, then they’ll have 1 mile walking time to surrender.

I mentally added everything you said with "...for now."

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