They've gone and done it. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has found a way to be even less humane.
Not content with horsemen swinging whips at desperate refugees and CBP agents destroying migrants' water supplies in the desert, now the agency finds itself absolutely salivating over the potential use of robot dogs to patrol the Southwest border.
These robot dogs, made by a company named Ghost Robotics, look much like the species of mechanical "smart" canine that lie at the root of human eradication in the Black Mirror episode titled "Metalhead."
In a troubling press release made even grosser by its liberal embrace of canine puns, the Department of Homeland Security sounds super turned on by the idea of this new technology, which "can assist with enhancing the capabilities of CBP personnel, while simultaneously increasing their safety downrange" in the harsh desert environment of the American Southwest.
The development comes at the behest of the Science and Technology Directorate, the R&D arm of Homeland Security working to develop James Bond-level equipment for the use of tormenting immigrants illegally trying to cross into the U.S.
A lot of creepy Orwellian talk follows, with palpable excitement over these 1oo-pound "quadruped mechanical reinforcements" "to force-multiply the CBP presence" while traversing "all types of natural terrain including sand, rocks, and hills, as well as human-built environments, like stairs."
Getting Amurica's xenophobic fears stoked, the document describes the work of patrolling the border as dangerous, also invoking drug and human smugglers, "criminal organizations, terrorists or hostile governments" and even—no they didn't—WMDs, to assure the same public and politicians who went rabid for an illegal war in Iraq will quickly leap aboard.
The missive notes that this project has been at least two and a half years in the making, with strenuous testing of the dogs' video-taking abilities, robot control capabilities, and maneuverability over varied terrain. The Army's Night Vision Division was brought in, as was the Electronic Sensors Directorate to equip them with sensors to sniff out chemical and nuclear weapons, all to ensure these suckers were war-ready and able to take down weary, dehydrated, desert-battered migrants with maximum scare factor.
Anyway, the breakdown continues, detailing what the dogs can do, how they were trained, and how they will 'keep us safe' from inevitable terror by harassing the already demonized immigrants who look like just our neighbors and/or grandparents. And it's all there to read yourself if you want to go and make yourself sick.
The long and short of it is the government has a scary new toy and will most likely keep scaring the shit out of us until they have a majority clamoring for these "Terminator dogs" in our streets and or quietly accepting/ignoring their growing presence in our busy everyday lives of Wordle playing and NFT buying.
Until the day they devour us all to become the only things still moving on Earth.
