Are we all doomed to live in Charlie Brooker’s techno-dystopia? In Metalhead, an episode from season four of his famed Netflix show Black Mirror, a woman navigates an austere post-apocalyptic landscape while running for her life from a murderous robot dog. What makes the mechanized beast in the show particularly frightening is the lethal combination of the single-mindedness of a computer program with the extreme ferocity of an angry, feral dog.
But it’s just TV, right? Not exactly. The military, technological, security and political classes in this country appear united in their desire to make robot dogs part of our future, and we should all be worried.
