About a month ago the news hit the wire that Korean giant Hyundai was pursuing the purchase of the company at the forefront of evil murder robot dog research, Boston Dynamics. Wednesday, according to Korean Economic Daily’s sources, an agreement was reached to complete the transaction near the initial $1 billion number, allegedly the settled number once the dust cleared was $921 million.
That price is a pittance for a quadrupedal yellow dog that can do backflips and soullessly take over the human race, you know, probably. I never would have guessed that a giant pile of money with googly eyes like SoftBank would want to get rid of its robot dog operations, and I cannot fathom what Hyundai would want with the operation, but you never can tell which evil billionaire genius might be backing this to hide his own intentions.
Maybe Hyundai is aiming to train the robot dogs to defend itself in the battle of the future when Amazon starts weaponizing its drone and Rivian van fleets for nefarious purposes. Maybe we should all work toward a mutually assured destruction zero-sum game in the fight against Amazon. Who knows what the Alphabet vs. Amazon World War III may bring. In ten years’ time, perhaps we’ll all have a laugh about how smart Hyundai was to invest in robot dogs.
Maybe, as Raph suggested a month ago, Hyundai is working to save humanity from itself by dismantling Boston Dynamics from the inside. Oooh, maybe the top Hyundai brass has insider information from a time traveler visiting from the future with a warning about the Boston Dynamics robot dog takeover.
I don’t want to get too excited, but Hyundai could be the company that brings about the downfall of humanity, or our one and only savior. As with all things, time will tell.
We have contacted Hyundai for comment, to confirm the report, and to request a robot dog of our own to test, but have not yet received a statement. I will update this story as soon as one is received.
Update Wednesday, December 9, 7PM ET. Hyundai’s Global PR Team Leader Jin Cha provided this comment “As a global business entity, Hyundai Motor is continuously exploring various investment and partnership opportunities. As a company policy, we do not comment on market speculations.”
Obviously no commitment was made to provide Jalopnik with our own murder robots, but once we get one... oooh boy, lookout!