“The next neat thing that’s going to happen is cloud robotics: that’s where, when one robot learns something, they all learn something.” Ha ha, sure, yes. Neat is one word for it.

This weekend, at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, robots built by teams from around the world will accomplish complex tasks like driving a vehicle and walking up stairs. This is a compilation video of those robots falling down. Laugh at them now, with whatever short-lived impunity we may still have.

It has been a busy week for the Machine-Human Alliance. Sorry! The Human-Machine Alliance. Humans will always take precedence. First there was the deployment of South Korea's autonomous jellyfish-killing aquatic robot swarm. Now, in a completely unrelated development, the engineers at Boston Dynamics—working on behalf of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—have released video of the WildCat, an untethered version of their quadrupedal Cheetah robot, capable of standing and running freely under its own power.

While the rest of America watches the economy go down the shitter all over again, the Pentagon is busy blowing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on toys that don't work. Perhaps you've heard about the Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 and its alleged Prompt Global Strike™ capabilities? It failed for a second time during a test flight yesterday off the coast of California.

Much like Justin Bieber fans, America's enemies use social media to communicate, spread rumors and coordinate. It's one of the few bad things about the internet. Now, the Pentagon is seeking "meme trackers" to figure out what's the hottest new thing in the American Enemy Blogosphere.

Pentagon-backed scientists have developed a paper-thin robot that can fold itself into any shape, like a plane, or a boat. Probably it will eventually rise up and kill us all, but until then, origami will be much easier. [Wired]