You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

We live in the most amazing times. Someday soon when we are all living in caves wearing animal skins picking parasites off of each other, our children will ask why we no longer have cool stuff like the internet, running water, electricity, and food. When that time inevitably comes, you can at least tell your kids that you saw it coming.

The Terminator was Actually a Documentary

The people who work on artificial intelligence cannot cogently articulate exactly how AI works. The days of some computer geek settling in behind a keyboard to bang out code are gone never to return. Nowadays, computer programmers get their computers to write their computer code. It seems inevitable that those computers will eventually wise up and decide to cut out the middle man.

Unless you want to end up paying taxes to your microwave, it behooves us all to do a little sensible preparation. Chief among those post-apocalyptic chores is figuring out how to kill a robot dog. It’s not intuitive.

Know Your Enemy

Just in case you’ve been living underneath a bridge someplace, Google “scary robot dog” and get ready to have your world rocked. If you have an operational credit card, $9,420 will get you a flame-throwing robot dog over the Internet from ThrowFlame.com. The Unitree Go2 robot dog is only two grand. Uncle Sam has militarized versions sporting advanced sensors, thermal imagers, and machine guns. It just seems inevitable that we will someday go to war with these things.

For starters, the militarized versions are quite often armored. However, like tanks, extra armor means extra weight which means decreased agility. Such stuff is the perennial tactical tradeoff. With the right ammo, your typical defensive rifle should be up to the task, presuming you know where to shoot.

Feeding the Beast

GI green-tip M855 5.56mm ammunition incorporates a small tungsten penetrator into the bullet to offer better performance through light cover. It’s not armor-piercing per se, but it will still penetrate 3mm of mild steel at 600 meters. It’s even better up close. Think car doors and the like. That is likely adequate to deal with your typical robot dog.

I keep two PMags loaded with M855 next to my primary defensive rifle at the house. It doesn’t sport a label that says, “For use against armored robot dogs” or anything. However, yeah, it’s for use against armored robot dogs.

Mechanical Anatomy

It is tempting to concentrate on the head of the robot dog. However, robot dogs are anthropomorphically different from real dogs or carbon-based animals of any sort, for that matter. The head is just sensors. That’s not where the beast thinks.

It’s not unreasonable to shoot for its legs. In tank parlance, this would be called a mobility kill. The thing might remain prickly, and it may yet still be relaying vital tactical information back to your doorbell camera or your dishwasher or whatever else is coordinating everything. However, shoot one of its legs off, and at least it won’t be chasing after you with quite so much enthusiasm.

The Vitals

Heat is the mortal enemy of computers everywhere. As a result, the CPU for a robot dog is most commonly carried inside the main upper electronics bay underneath the top shell. They often include mechanical heat sinks or cooling fans. The CPU will be protected by the main chassis cover and may be armored. It makes for a small target, but putting a round through the mother board is going to reliably take that robot dog out of the fight.

The other sweet spot is the battery. Most robot dogs use lithium-ion, lithium polymer, or lithium iron phosphate rechargeable batteries. Older toy-grade mechanical hounds might incorporate nickel-metal hydride batteries, but these are not the machines that are going to be trying to get all up into your business.

The Achilles Heel

The common thread to robot dog batteries is lithium. Lithium is a soft, slivery-white alkali metal. It is, in fact, the lightest of all metallic elements. However, like all alkali metals, lithium is both highly reactive and flammable. As a result, pure lithium, like its legendarily malevolent cousin sodium, must be stored in a vacuum, an inert atmosphere, or within a liquid like purified kerosene. Expose that stuff to water or even wet air, and it is going to get all conflagrated.

Pass a bullet through the battery, and your robot dog will most likely incinerate itself right sharpish. You will find the battery on most robot dogs in a secure slot in the bottom or rear part of the torso. The battery assembly is fairly heavy, so it is usually stored low in the chassis to improve stability.

Ruminations

So, there you have it. When you inevitably have to defend your home and family from a weaponized AI-driven robot dog, don’t waste your time shooting it in the head. That will likely just make it angry. Concentrate your fire on the center of mass either toward the top focusing on the CPU or at the bottom to rupture the battery. Or just blow its legs off. Connect with any of that stuff, and humanity gets to live another day.

All this seems silly right up until it’s not. Knowing how to efficiently kill a robot dog may someday be something we teach little kids in school, presuming our evil mechanical overlords still allow us to have schools. It’s a brave new world, and luck always favors the prepared.