Real-Life Robots Are Scarier Than Call Of Duty’s Fiction

The viral marketing campaign for the forthcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 includes a website for The Guild, a fictional defense contractor moving into the civilian market with the ominous slogan “End your home security fears… forever.” Mock articles in Forbes (!) and WIRED describe The Guild’s sinister drones, robotic dogs and androids. Armed robots are scary but the campaign gets two things badly wrong. Firstly, the game is set in 2035, and The Guild already looks behind the curve in 2025. Secondly, the threat is not military hardware moving into the home: it’s the weaponization of the electronic toys we already have.

Military V Commercial Technology: The Big Shift

The military used to be well ahead of the commercial sector, and much of the tech we take for granted originally came from defence R&D. The internet originated as ARPAnet, made by the Pentagon’s Advance Researched Projects Agency (now DARPA). GPS, still operated by the US Space Force, was originally military-only. Even the integrated circuit, the ubiquitous ‘silicon chip’ was essentially created by Texas Instruments for the Air Force and the first large-scale use was on Minuteman II missiles. I wrote a whole book about this in 2005 – Weapons Grade: Revealing the Links Between Modern Warfare and Our High Tech World

But things changed, at least in the world of small electronics went. The smartphone revolution saw consumer electronics companies pouring billions into R&D and their pace, with a new phone every year, soon overtook the military’s multi-year procurement cycle. Economies of scale allowed phone makers to produce increasingly capable hardware at a fraction of the cost of the military’s bespoke systems.

This became painfully obvious in 2009 with the U.S. Army’s Land Warrior system, a tactical computer allowing soldiers to navigate and communicate with voice, text and data on the move. In other words the sort of thing people were doing on their phones. The difference was that Land Warrior weighed eight pounds and cost around $50,000. The Army quickly moved to a system based on ruggedized Android phones called Nett Warrior.

Ukraine’s Army Of Consumer Robots

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainians rushed to make use of the low-cost technology they had to hand. A call went out for drone hobbyists to help the military effort to provide much needed eyes in the sky. This led to at least one scenario worthy of Hollywood, when 15-year-old Andrii Pokrasa turned out to be the only drone user in the line of a Russian advance. Accompanied by his father, Pokrasa launched his drone and located a column of Russian tanks and personnel carriers, allowing Ukrainian artillery to target them and halt the advance.

Soon afterwards, Ukrainian racing drone enthusiasts adapted high-speed FPV drones into miniature guided missiles. Now built by the million, these low-cost weapons have become the most effective weapon in Ukraine’s an arsenal. Small drones now inflict the majority of Russian casualties. Critics call them toys, but they are toys made deadly.

On the ground, while NATO armies use million-dollar tracked robots, Ukrainians improvise. By attaching two hoverboards and a controller to a metal frame, they have created a low-cost robot to haul supplies. They even built an attack version with a rocket launcher for a few hundred dollars.

There are already robot dogs out there. The US military has been experimenting with them since the early 2000s, but their hardware is still pricey: the quadrupeds patrolling US air bases cost $150,000 apiece. Meanwhile Ukrainian troops have bought robotic dogs sold on the hobby market by Chinese company Unitree for $5,000, for exploring inside buildings and other hazardous tasks. No armed versions have been seen yet, but U.S. companies have displayed robot dogs fitted with sniper rifles, and the Chinese military have shown videos of their being used in exercises

Android Warriors

Last month Unitree launched its new low-cost humanoid robots. These may show up in Ukraine before long, perhaps walking ahead of patrols to find booby traps and clear routes through minefields, or taking bullets to expose enemy firing position. At a few thousand dollas apiece, these robots are cheap cannon fodder: limited, but infinitely more expendable than humans. Improvising an armed version to clear Russian trenches should not be an impossible technical challenge, given how easily troops in the field have attached sawn-off shotguns to drones.

Military hardware is too pricey for the civilian market. But there is plenty of flow the other way, and defence procurement struggles to keep up with consumer technology. Terrorists and criminals are already beginning to catch on. Cartels are already using drones for smuggling, scouting and dropping bombs. In the U.S., rightwing extremist groups are openly discussing how they will use drones in an upcoming civil war.

Tesla’s Optimus robot will soon be mass produced as a general-purpose worker. But it is almost inevitable that it will be hacked for military purposes, just as DJI’s hobby drones are hacked in ways their makers never intended in Ukraine.

Smuggled AI chips made by companies like NVIDIA are already being used in highly autonomous Russian killer drones, and these are rapidly getting more capable. The remote-controlled drones and robots of today will need little if any human input in the next few years.

Call of Duty is right to predict a future of dangerous robots. They are wrong to think the hardware will come from the defence sector. Everyone – including rogue states, terrorists and cartels – now has access to advanced new technology from the consumer market.

We can expect highly autonomous wheeled, tracked, legged and humanoid robots to get cheaper and more common. And, as in Ukraine, the early adopters will be people looking for low-cost, easily available weapon systems.