Uncle Patso says:

Fairly impressive — I would estimate Pet Man incorporates processing power equivalent to somewhere between that of a gecko and that of a mole. But as always, the software takes much much longer than the hardware to come up to snuff. That is the main reason I am skeptical of Kurzweil’s “singularity.” Even given hardware development in the lab, production takes time to ramp up; Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain came up with the transistor in 1947, but it still took until well into the 1960s for cheap transistor radios to be widely available, about 15 years.

As a stable two-legged platform, this thing is well along, but the problems of binocular vision are dozens if not hundreds of times more difficult. And we’re still at least decades away from anything capable of anything like value judgments or any of the other flights of A.I. fancy.

deowll says:

Not to impressed at this stage.

On the other hand a twelve foot long mechanical scorpion might make an effective guard even if its mental abilities were kind of lame.

A mechanical crab hauling around a charge of explosives is another alternative. There has been work done on these.

Last and not least a six foot or longer mechanical centipede with each pair of legs acting like pincers is something anyone sane would want to avoid. It could use toxins but it could just as easily grab on and hold on. Not something I’d want wrapped around my leg, front, or back while trying to make a fast get away.