If you still haven’t seen the fantastic video of the new robot from Boston Dynamics, take a look. Especially from 1:25 onward.
It’s impossible to shake the feeling that it’s a trick, and that there’s actually a person inside. Maybe someone with tiny legs, or a child, or something like that. A machine just can’t move like that — it’s already getting pretty close to *Star Wars*.
And the second thought that comes to mind is how painful this is for our science and engineering. The “cursed ’90s” are definitely no longer to blame. For 16 years already — since 2000 — there has been plenty of money. Similar projects could have been funded. The annual budget of DARPA, at whose initiative things like this are being developed, is only $2.8–3.5 billion. In our case, $15 billion was stolen just at the Olympics.
Since 2010, the budget of Russia’s Ministry of Defense has been enormous and has been growing at an unimaginable pace. What do we have to show for that money in terms of promising developments in military robotics?
A manipulator from the ISS (International Space Station) fitted with an imported Wi‑Fi antenna, the kind sold in an ordinary store.
And do you know what else kills the development of serious domestic technology? Lies. Endless lies and empty bravado. We simply do not have robotics in this country. That needs to be acknowledged and developed, instead of showing this pathetic junk on television to the country’s leadership as some cutting-edge breakthrough with no equivalent in the West.
To be honest, what we have so far is a “Young Technician” club (a Soviet-era youth engineering hobby group) stuck at the 1980 level. There is nothing to brag about, there is no “design genius,” and the engineers in this field available to the Defense Ministry are professionally unfit.
This applies to everything: PR and lies have wrapped themselves so tightly around the authorities that they obstruct normal development. At the state level, they seriously claim that the Russian Navy has “surged ahead, leaving the Americans far behind”, despite the objectively enormous gap between our fleet and the U.S. Navy. And state propaganda has a reverse effect on real life. Once we loudly proclaim our successes, we can no longer speak just as loudly about our problems. Important issues are hushed up, then they stagnate, then they deteriorate. We already went through all this with the USSR, which presented itself as so advanced — and then turned out to be the opposite.
We can see the same thing in science: underfunding and collapse, against a backdrop of bombastic “we have such marvelous devices...” rhetoric, have led to Russia now being at Iran’s level in terms of the number of scientific publications.
So, in short, it’s the usual story: the absence of political competition and parliamentary oversight allows the authorities to cover up mistakes and pushes them into making new ones. The absence of independent media makes it possible to convince the public that a helmet and a military jacket are a promising military innovation. Scientific competition loses all meaning under conditions of bureaucratic and shadowy resource allocation. Engineers grow bored and lose their skills, just as they did in Soviet research institutes in the 1980s.
There is only one conclusion: let’s fight for democracy — without it, we will never have cool robots. Authoritarian regimes do not know how to create them; they specialize in producing deceitful TV reports.