Industrial Electronics

Calm Down, This Robot is Not Coming to Kill You!

21 August 2018

Apparently, a video went viral recently that showed a robot walking down a street in a very human-like way and social media lost its mind thinking this was the first stage of Skynet and a robot takeover.

But much like many things on Twitter and other social media platforms, all is not what it seems.

While incredibly realistic, the robot was in fact computer-generated graphics from Neil Blomkamp’s production company known as Oats Studios. The video was footage from a new short film series Blomkamp is directing called “Adam.” Blomkamp is famous for directing the science fiction films “District 9,” “Chappie” and “Elysium.”

Blomkamp chimed in on Twitter that while Oats Studios was not responsible for the actual footage of the robot walking down the street, the computer-generated robot is from his production house and someone took it and plopped it into a backdrop.

“Although no one would welcome a robot uprising more than I, it’s actually part of this series,” Blomkamp said on Twitter with a link to the short film.

The viral video made such a splash that Snopes, the website famous for debunking or proving conspiracy theories and social media news items, got involved in order to help calm fears of an impending robot uprising.

To contact the author of this article, email PBrown@globalspec.com


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