Toni Steffens

Robo dog- who are you? A creature, a robot and also a dog. You are a manmade killer, carrying a riffle on your back, ready to kill whoever your master orders you to kill. It hasn’t been long since I came to like robots or dogs. Most of them made me feel indifferent and at worst scared. Now I like dogs, I even consider to get a puppy. When I am trying to find a way to you, Robo dog, there are certain mind perversions, I cannot fully wrap my head around. For instance to see a YouTube video about a robot/ AI engineer who recounts the moment of silence and shock when the “quadruped” was aired on some robotics fair. How the present collective of robot designers and engineers found itself confronted with what remained beyond the limits of their imagination. Do not get me wrong, Robo dog, I do not think you were really that hard to be fathomed into existence. You make perfect sense inside a history of subordination of non human beings and machines, a history of domestication and drill. While it seems perhaps ridiculous, that people who’s primary work is to design instruments to control, interfere with, such as eventually hunt down and annihilate other people have some sort of imaginary, moral boundaries, what was even more haunting for me, was the fact that this calm and collected engineer, remembering the incidence, merely a side occurrence in his perhaps otherwise unbothered existence, started to smile, shyly and almost humbled, a kind of awkward reminiscence  of what perhaps once was a feeling of shame. I believe, if you made yourself such a man, shame has systematically been driven out of your realm of experiences. You, the superior, the forth bringer of technological advance, ultimately will bringing the rest of us to light, you do not have to think about the necessary sacrifices of those lives, you lay waste to. Yet, to sit amongst likeminded colleagues and air the imitation of a dog that can carry all kind of technological extensions such as cameras, rifles, sensors and detectors, must somehow made him self aware of something startling, this seemingly gentle man. What did you do, Robo dog? Was it the usage of a part of who you are, a creature often called the best friend of mankind, the most loyal amongst all animal companions and to create a version of it, that, even a dog of flesh and blood is afraid of, as one can see in some tik tok videos. Was it to use those characteristics to join the madness of mankind towards its bizarre and unique desire for violence, its in-saturable wish to see the world and its multi species inhabitants destroyed. And to do so in order to feel perhaps less alone in its perversion, for normalising its thirst for annihilation, since you, Robo dog, both remember, confirm and bring forward this legacy of human domination, that, eventually somewhere deep down, brings a sense of twisted familiarity, friendship and companionship to the battle field. Or is it maybe, how the shape and the very being of our animal companions can remind us of things, even you Robo dog can’t deny, as you effortlessly jumps through the conflict zones? That we cannot shape shift that aspect of your being. That the more we shape shift the violence we breed, the more you will jump and not bark, but shoot at us.