Of course, this being a government project in an era where George Orwell's visions of an omnipresent police state appear more and more realistic, it's not difficult to imagine the offspring of the Atlas project treading across the battlefield, gun in hand, spraying bullets at America's enemies in countries too poor to fund multi-million dollar robotic soldiers. Neither Boston Dynamics nor the Pentagon has revealed any plans to push Atlas into this kind of service, but if we keep churning out humanoid robots with increasingly impressive feature sets, it seems inevitable that at some point someone will decide to arm the things.