To me it seems far from only a proof of concept, specially in light of who is financing it and the rest of Boston Dynamics' robots.

As inventors, I would say it's high time we start to think about the consequences of our tech "innovations".

Yes but the US military already has armed robots. I could see this maybe being used as a transport but even that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be used to kill people.

Though granted if the people it's transporting have guns that's a moot point.

DARPA also financed the Internet. I think we can expect similar public benefits to come out of this research one day.

Excellent example. But we also failed to build the necessary safeguards to prevent using the Internet as a massive surveillance machine. When will we learn something from our past failures?

Our past track record is pretty uneven, that's for sure. One starting point is here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/AAAI_P...

Thanks, interesting initiative.