For those of you who thought I was joking about killbots I have bad news: I wasn’t joking about killbots. The state has been looking into killbots for some time and its search is starting to become serious:
A robot, equipped with an M240 machine gun, moves through the darkness until it stops under a stand of trees 100 yards from its squad of U.S. troops. The robot uses thermal imaging to detect enemy combatants hiding up ahead and aims its gun at them.
With a single command from its human controller, who is with the squad 100 yards back, the robot opens fire and takes out the enemy, saving the troops from a potentially deadly attack.
Eventually our government will decided that having humans withing 100 yards of the killbots is a liability and will attempt to move them back. Terrestrial drones require more immediate decision making than their aerial brethren so having pilots in Colorado won’t work. That means controllers will have to be near the battlefield and, eventually, the enemies of America will learn to strike those areas instead of fighting our terrestrial drones. After that happens our government will decide that having soldiers on the battlefield is dangerous regardless of proximity. When that decision has been made the terrestrial drones will be made autonomous and we’ll finally have fully automated warfare. Best of all, any innocent people who are killed by our autonomous killing machines can be written off as a software glitch.
The future is both amazing and frightening at the same time.