The future was once reassuringly remote. Back in the last century we’d speculate about it idly with no sense of urgency: would there be flying cars? Jet-packs? Frankly, after Soda Streams, anything and everything seemed possible, but the future stayed in its proper place, ahead of us, and we approached it at a nice, manageable pace.
Sometime around 2020 that changed. The future did a volte-face and began to accelerate towards us, and now it’s everywhere, suffocatingly close. Superintelligent robots, missions to Mars, babies grown in bags… it’s all too much to take in. And as of last week, genetically modified, cloned and armour-clad hell hounds of war.
The future did a volte-face and began to accelerate towards us, and now it’s everywhere
Palmer Luckey, one of Donald Trump’s favourite tech cowboys, founder of Anduril Industries which supplies drones to the US military, has just released details of Warhound, a joint venture with another tech cowboy, Ben Lamm of Colossal Biosciences. Colossal Biosciences is famous for trying (and succeeding) to bring back extinct species using cloned and adapted DNA. It’s hard to pick just one of their eye-watering tag-lines, but ‘we endeavour to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat’ gives you some sense of the vibe.
Anyway, Luckey is part of the Pentagon’s new ‘future weapons’ task force, and so it’s instructive to see that Luckey and Lamm’s latest wheeze is a company called Warhound, devoted to creating the ultimate warrior dog. They’re using Colossal’s expertise to erase genetic weaknesses from the cleverest and most aggressive dog breeds in existence – such as the Belgian Malinois – and the plan is then to enhance them with Anduril’s military tech. Anduril’s ‘Eagle-eye’ headpiece already allows human soldiers night vision, thermal vision, contact with drones and a constantly updating dynamic map of enemy terrain. The canine version of ‘Eagle-eye’ will be waiting for the pups when they’re trained. ‘Man’s best friend deserves man’s best tech,’ said Luckey. And if it’s not immediately clear to me what use a Belgian Malinois can make of a dynamic map, that’s perhaps only because I’m behind the times.
If you enjoyed a sci-fi comic back in the last century, 2000 AD let’s say, warrior hell-hounds with heat sensors sounds both exciting and familiar. I can see the scene in which an augmented Malinois with laser eyes leaps snarling at some cowering enemy. But the trouble is it’s not fiction. The first batch of pups is due next year, and soon after, if the dogs perform as expected, the great global hellhound-breeding arms race will begin.
A walk through the sketchier parts of any major city will show you what happens when dogs become weapons. Pretty soon, there are things the size of juvenile hippos slinking about in the shadows, pulling their owner’s arms from their shoulder sockets. So just imagine, in the age of AI and gene editing, how competitive global Warhound breeding projects might end up. Colossal Biosciencesis best known for its ‘de-extinction’ projects. They’ve claimed to have revived the vast extinct ‘dire wolf’ by reconstructing its genome and editing gray wolf cells to express key dire wolf traits. You can watch the pups gambol on YouTube: Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, they’re called, which tells you all you need to know about the tech bro brain.
And what’s to stop Anduril adding armoured, enhanced dire wolves to their military kit stock list? Or sabre-toothed tigers (we have the DNA)? In the era of LLMs, what’s to stop any rogue outfit cooking up its own Frankenbeasts? I’d challenge any army to keep up their soldiers’ morale while weaponised big cats are leaving whimsical piles of enemy entrails around the war zone.
Colossal Biosciences is also trying to bring back the woolly mammoth, all six tons of it, using adapted elephant DNA. It’s the ancient world re-imagined for the 21st century. Think Hannibal war-mammoth. Or the return of weaponised megafauna. Or just straight-up Jurassic Park. According to the New York Post a few days ago, Colossal Biosciences is right now in the process of suing a former scientist for allegedly stealing confidential research and sharing it with competing biotech firms. It’s a fun game to guess which awful war beast each terrorist outfit or rogue regime will choose to create.
Last month we learnt that our Stone Age ancestors once lived in terror of giant avian apex predators. A little early human infant, a three-year-old Australopithecus africanus child, was wandering the South African savannah when she was hauled off by some Paleolithic flying horror. Her skull was found with puncture marks below her eye sockets consistent with claw marks. Reporting this news, the BBC felt bound to add a trigger warning: ‘Some readers may find details in this story upsetting.’
Not half as upsetting as they’re going to find it when, in this accelerating future, our sons have to face some weaponised version of circling raptors, with laser eyes and tungsten claws. It’s not impossible, it’s not even improbable. Look at what the great weapons–testing lab of the Ukraine kill zone has become. There are drones of all sizes now circling constantly, ever-evolving. Roads in the kill zone are hung with netting to keep them out. Large fixed-wing drones carry smaller kamikaze drones under their awful wings. The battlefield is said now to have entered a ‘mothership’ era, where larger carrier drones transport and release smaller ‘parasite’ drones deep behind enemy lines. The zone, once safe for field hospitals, logistics hubs and troops, is now lethal. Soldiers move only during bad weather.
Into this scene now inject GM animals, vast muscled and armoured dogs and wolves with enhanced senses, acting in tandem with lethal drones, hunting humans. You can’t jam a dog’s signal, or knock its satellite out. World War 3: Megafauna Strikes Back. Once upon a time that would have been a joke. In the age of Warhound, it’s a prediction.
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