Surprising no one, the Japanese took their scarecrow game to the next level, unveiling their terrifying robotic Super Monster Wolf.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. The Japanese completely ignored that mantra and went ahead and built a robot demon wolf. The robot's official name is "Super Monster Wolf" -- fitting -- and a prototype is currently on loan to the JA Kisarazu-shi agricultural cooperative association. The robot sits at one-and-a-half feet tall and approximately two feet long, which is definitely small for a wolf. But what it lacks in size, it makes up for by striking fear into area wildlife. You see, the robotic wolf was designed to keep predators away from livestock on farmland and to stop birds and other animals from grazing on crops. For centuries, Western farmers have used scarecrows to keep birds and small animals from grazing on a farm's seeds and crops. The Japanese took this to a whole new level and decided to try their hand with a robotic wolf. Except, while the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz didn't have a brain, this Super Monster Wolf clearly has no soul. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzfSfwR0ZFw Developers spared no expense. The robotic wolf uses infrared sensors to detect nearby wildlife and relies on red glowing LEDs and pre-recorded barking sounds to scare the living crap out of them. If a full-throated growl doesn't do the trick, the developers also included a recording of a human voice shouting and even a gunshot. The animatronics could use a little work, to be honest. The beast's legs don't move. The only motors in the robot are used to turn its head left-to-right. It would be at least 100 times more terrifying if its canted legs allowed it to perform a horror movie spider walk. None of this would be necessary if the Japanese didn't hunt the local Hokkaido wolf to extinction in the late 1800s when farmers became tired of the wolves hunting their livestock. Little did they know that their descendants would electronically resurrect the beast ... City government officials in Kisarazu, Japan (because it makes complete sense for a project like this to have its own government monitors) report that there have been no sightings or evidence of wild animals or birds since the Super Monster Wolf was installed on the test farm on July 11.
How much does this nightmare cost? Just a cool $1,810. Not only that, but the company that manufactured the Super Monster Wolf expects to sell out locally in Japan when it goes on sale in September. Given the success of the product so far, the company admits it will need to ramp up production to meet demand in the United States.
Like hell they will.
I refuse to live in a world where these terrors dot the American countryside. That's exactly what they would love to happen, isn't it? They'd just love to send thousands of these mechanized demons to our shores. We still haven't even recovered from the Furby invasion in the late 1990s.
Tesla founder Elon Musk warned us this month that killer robots pose a bigger threat to humanity than a nuclear North Korea.
Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare,” the letter, released to the public on Monday, said. “Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways."If my conspiracy theory about these Japanese robotic wolves is correct [Editor's Note: It probably isn't], this doomsday scenario could be closer than we even thought. The Japanese may welcome their robot wolf overlords, but I certainly don't.
