The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesn’t move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robot’s ring-light heads turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed. Then it lurches forward at you.The scene plays out like one of those moments in a sci-fi movie when the heroes think for sure the all-powerful villain must be done for, but somehow he comes back stronger than ever. Except it’s a real-life video released last month by the robotics company Boston Dynamics to introduce its new Atlas robot. The humanoid machine, according to the video’s caption, is intended to further the company’s “commitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in industry today.” It has also freaked out many people, and the video has garnered millions of views. “Impressive? Yes. Terrifying? Absolutely,” wrote a reporter for The Verge. Terminator and I, Robot memes abounded. Elon Musk suggested that it looked like it was in the throes of an exorcism.You might think that such reactions would concern Boston Dynamics, that it would seem bad for the public to associate your product with dystopian sci-fi. But the company is used to this. Over the past decade-plus, Boston Dynamics has become arguably America’s most famous robotics company by posting unnerving viral videos that elicit a predictable cascade of reactions: things like “Could you imagine this thing chasing you?” and “We’re doomed.” When the company posts a video like the one of the new Atlas, and viewers get worked up, it all appears to be part of the plan.Even if you don’t know Boston Dynamics by name, there is a good chance you have seen one of its videos before. Clips of robots running faster than Usain Bolt and dancing in sync, among many others, have helped the company reach true influencer status. Its videos have now been viewed more than 800 million times, far more than those of much bigger tech companies, such as Tesla and OpenAI. The creator of Black Mirror even admitted that an episode in which killer robot dogs chase a band of survivors across an apocalyptic wasteland was directly inspired by Boston Dynamics’ videos.The company got into the viral-video game by accident. Now owned by Hyundai, Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 as a spin-off of an MIT robotics lab, and for years had operated in relative obscurity. In the 2000s, someone grabbed a video off the company’s website and uploaded it to YouTube. Before long, it had 3.5 million views. That first YouTube hit is when “the light went on—this matters,” Marc Raibert, the founder, has said. (Boston Dynamics did not provide an interview or comment for this story.) In July 2008, the company created a YouTube channel and began uploading its own videos. Almost every one topped 1 million views. Within a few years, they were regularly collecting tens of millions.Many of Boston Dynamics’ videos seem engineered to fuel people’s most dystopian fantasies, such as the one in which it dressed its humanoid robot in camo and a gas mask. But the company is careful not to lean too far in this direction. Alongside videos of the robots looking creepy or performing incredible feats, it has offered ones in which the robots failed spectacularly, were bullied by their human makers, or did silly dances; in response, people professed to feeling “sorry for” or “emotionally attached to” these robots. The company’s recent farewell video for its old Atlas model, retired days before the new one was released, included clips of the robot toppling off a balance beam and tumbling down a hill. “What we’ve tried to do is make videos that you can just look at and understand what you’re seeing,” Raibert told Wired in 2018. “You don’t need words, you don’t need an explanation. We’re neither hiding anything nor faking anything.”Boston Dynamics has not said much publicly about how it trains its robots. But when viewers watch videos of the recently retired hydraulic Atlas doing parkour, they might well assume that if it can execute such complex maneuvers, then it can do pretty much anything. In fact, it has likely been programmed to perform a handful of specific tricks, Chelsa Finn, an AI researcher at Stanford University, told me last year. As I wrote then, robots have lagged behind chatbots and other kinds of generative AI because “the physical world is extremely complicated, far more so than language.” The company posted its first video of Atlas doing a backflip in 2017; more than six years later, the robot still is not commercially available. “The athletic part of robotics is really doing well,” Raibert told Wired in January, “but we need the cognitive part.”The actual business of Boston Dynamics is comparatively mundane. Currently, its humanoid robots are purely for research and development. Its commercial products—a large robotic arm and a small robotic dog—are used mainly for moving boxes and workplace safety and inspections. “The perception of how far along the field is that we get from these highly curated, essentially PR-campaign videos … from different companies is a bit distorted,” Raphaël Millière, a philosopher at Macquarie University, in Sydney, whose work focuses on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, told me. “You should always take these with a grain of salt, because they’re likely to be carefully choreographed routines.”The company, for its part, has gestured at the limits of its robots in press releases and YouTube descriptions. But it still keeps posting dystopian videos that keep freaking people out. “They probably made a calculated decision that actually this is not bad press,” Millière said, “but rather, it makes the videos more viral.” The company recognizes that we love fantasizing about our own demise—to a point—and it supplies regular fodder. The strategy has paid off. Now pretty much all the top robotics companies post video demonstrations on YouTube, some of which are more advanced than Boston Dynamics’. Its video introducing the new Atlas robot garnered more than twice as many views as this frankly far more impressive video from the lesser-known robotics company Figure.In recent years, AI companies seem to have taken a page out of the Boston Dynamics playbook. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks about the existential threat of superhuman AI, he is in effect deploying the same strategy. So, too, are the other executives who have invoked the “risk of extinction” that AI poses to humanity. As my colleague Matteo Wong has written, AI doomerism functions as a fantastic PR strategy, in that it makes the product seem far more advanced than it actually is.Boston Dynamics is poised to benefit from the revolution those companies have delivered. Hardly a week after the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, the company announced the creation of a new AI Institute. Last month, it posted a video about using simulations and machine learning to teach its robot dogs how to move through a range of real-world environments. And the press release for the new Atlas robot explicitly talked up the company’s progress in AI and machine learning over the past couple of years: “We have equipped our robots with new AI and machine learning tools, like reinforcement learning and computer vision, to ensure they can operate and adapt efficiently to complex real-world situations.” In normal English, Atlas might soon not just look but actually be, in a certain sense, possessed. Now that would really be scary.

Israel has been convicted of genocide by protesters at Columbia and UCLA, but its genocide case before the International Court of Justice is still pending. Israel remains officially aghast that it, and only it, is subject to judicial proceedings for the crime of genocide—and that the ICJ’s rulings so far have implied that the judges think Israel might be guilty of the crime of crimes. According to reports this weekend, the International Criminal Court—a separate body that hears cases against individuals—is preparing arrest warrants for Israeli officials and possibly Hamas leaders. In the ICJ, Israel stands alone.In January, the judges stopped short of ordering Israel to stop fighting in Gaza, but they voted 15–2 to remind Israel of its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Among the judges voting with the majority was the German jurist Georg Nolte. His written opinion was curiously apologetic. He called the whole situation, including the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, “apocalyptic.” He noted, correctly, that the case before him was not about “possible violations of the Genocide Convention by persons associated with Hamas.” The ICJ hears cases between and against states, and Hamas isn’t one. “While these limitations may be unsatisfactory, the Court is bound to respect them,” he wrote. “I would like to recall, however, that persons associated with Hamas remain responsible for any acts of genocide that they may have committed.”[James Smith: The genocide double standard]Was this a coded suggestion? Without consideration of the October 7 attacks, something is missing from the ICJ proceedings, and Nolte is not the only one to sense an omission. The case is going forward almost as if the Gaza war were not preceded by, and in retaliation for, an attack that itself resembled genocide. Israel’s defenders, including its legal team at the ICJ, have complained that the proceedings tell only half the story, and that a full assessment of the facts would demand consideration of Hamas’s actions, too.There is a simple remedy for this problem: Charge Palestine with genocide, and let the ICJ hear both cases at once.The idea is not mine. I first heard it from David J. Scheffer, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the Clinton administration as ambassador at large for war-crimes issues. At least three of the judges’ opinions, he told me, suggested that they were “uncomfortable arriving at a determination on the merits of this case, when a large component of the entire situation is not on the table.” Nolte hinted at this view most strongly. The declarations of judges from Uganda and India also noted the absence, as did the judge designated by Israel, Aharon Barak. Scheffer said a parallel case against Palestine “would be to the advantage of the court and, frankly, facilitate their ability to reach a decision” that enjoyed a broad legitimacy.Every international lawyer I spoke with about this idea called it wild and implausible. Foremost among the objections is the fact that the international representative of the state of Palestine is the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas. The PA is not just not Hamas—it is directly opposed to Hamas, which slaughtered PA members when it seized control of Gaza in 2007.Irrelevant, Scheffer says. “Hamas members are nationals of the state of Palestine, which is party to the Genocide Convention.” The Genocide Convention obligates its parties (including Israel and most other countries) to prevent, investigate, and punish genocidal acts. The failure to prevent and punish was enough to convict Serbia of genocide in a case before the ICJ in 2007. If Hamas committed genocide on October 7, then Palestine was obligated to stop it and punish its culpable members. Palestine has manifestly failed to do so, with even token gestures. Palestine “is supposed to prevent you from committing genocide, even if you’re a terrorist,” Sheffer told me. “Its duty is to prevent and punish genocide. And I don’t think there’s a record of any punishment [by the PA] of any Hamas member.”Others doubted that Palestine was even subject to the ICJ’s jurisdiction, because the state of Palestine is not a member of the United Nations General Assembly. It is a “nonmember observer state.” Sheffer points out that this question comes close to being resolved by a statement, helpfully posted on the ICJ’s website, from the state of Palestine itself, consenting to the ICJ’s jurisdiction. In 2018, Palestine went to the court to object to the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In doing so, it declared that it “accepts all the obligations of a Member of the United Nations” with respect to the ICJ. Moreover, Article IX of the Genocide Convention—which Palestine joined in 2014, and Israel joined in 1950—specifies that the ICJ will hear any cases concerning genocide.Eliav Lieblich, an international-law professor at Tel Aviv University and a critic of Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war, pronounced the idea of instituting a genocide case against Palestine “theoretically interesting” but “a political nonstarter.” Cases have to be brought to the court by a state, as South Africa did against Israel. Lieblich noted that any state bringing a case against Palestine would, in effect, be recognizing the Palestinian state. You can’t prosecute a state whose existence you deny. That catch-22 favors Palestine: Countries that recognize Palestine tend to be on Palestine’s side, and therefore disinclined to prosecute it at the ICJ.[Graeme Wood: Israel’s bitter bind]But plenty of countries could still bring the case. Of the 193 members of the UN General Assembly, 151 have joined the Genocide Convention. Of those, more than 100 recognize the state of Palestine. Remove from that list the countries that are so pro-Palestine that they would never bring such a case, and at least 30 countries remain, including Cambodia, Paraguay, and Poland.Any of these countries could start proceedings. But who would want to? (“We have enough problems,” one official from a country on the list replied when I asked if his country would be game.) Longtime critics of Israel have treated South Africa as heroic for stepping up to prosecute Israel. Any country that prosecuted Palestine would probably risk the opposite effect on its reputation.But Scheffer urges countries to think strategically about the effect of bringing a case against Palestine. Doing so would greatly influence the proceedings against Israel, he says, and that influence “is not necessarily to the detriment of South Africa’s position.” Israel’s complaint that it is lonely in the dock vanishes instantly if it has company. Judges would be more inclined to rule against Israel, Scheffer suggests, if they did not feel that they were singling out the Jewish state. “If they could also look at the evidence regarding Hamas and say there is also a violation by the state of Palestine, that would be a much more comfortable position for judges to take.”And it is far from certain that the court would convict Palestine. Palestine could defend itself by saying that it failed to prevent genocide because it was itself prevented from doing so by Israel, through its occupation of the West Bank and hamstringing of the Palestinian Authority’s capacity to act. Eliav Lieblich noted that in other international courts, a state’s duties are lightened or relieved when its territory is controlled by another, stronger state. Israel would not relish having to observe this defense.And, finally, the ICJ imposes very high burdens on the prosecution in genocide cases. The prosecution must demonstrate the intent to destroy a protected group, and the absence of plausible nongenocidal intents that might explain the behavior of the accused. Could a prosecutor show that the only possible rationale for Hamas’s actions on October 7 was to commit genocide against Jews? Could Palestine convince the judges that Hamas was instead attempting to resist Israel’s occupation, and that if Hamas intended genocide, it would have planned its operation differently? If so, Palestine, and by extension Hamas, would likely be acquitted.Israel has at its disposal a similar defense. Might the death and suffering of Gazans be attributable not to an intent to wipe them from the Earth, but to a desire to free hostages and defend itself against a terror group that commits flagrant war crimes, vows to keep doing so, and uses civilians as shields? If so, Israel, too, stands a good chance of acquittal.One frequently noted shortcoming of the International Court of Justice, and of international law more broadly, is that its justice is applied unevenly (and often by the strong against the weak). Israel is frustrated that, at the ICJ, it seems to be allowed only to lose, while its wartime adversary remains beyond judgment of any type. The verdicts would not depend on each other—one party could be guilty and the other innocent—but the ICJ’s legitimacy does seem to be tied to the willingness of the court, and the states before it, to punish potential violators of all types, and not just those vilified, rightly or wrongly, in the current wave of fashionable opinion.