The Reuters News Kill-Bot Report

I have posted before on different types of smart weapons for the 21st century. For example, in a 5 part series of articles titled Dawn of the Kill-Bots (see Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5) I argued that despite the high media coverage of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan what we are (not) witnessing is the rise of armed military robots capable of killing humans. There I claimed that within the history of the human species those conflicts may eventually turn out to be known as the dawn of the kill-bots – the period during which increasingly self-sufficient machines became capable of and started making increasingly autonomous decisions about killing human beings. Thus I speculated that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan may turn out to be a lot more than merely a chapter in the War on Terrorism or a conflict between incompatible ideologies. What those conflicts could turn out to be is but the foreword of an altogether new type of war – the conflict between man and machine, mankind and robotkind…

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Today Reuters News posted a video titled Robots To Change The Face Of Warfare where Kat Jackson reports that robots have already proven themselves effective on the battlefield. Then she takes a look at the latest TALON kill-bot versions by defense contractor QinetiQ at a recent unmanned vehicle convention in Denver as a glimpse of what is still to come.

See the video below or check out Popular Science’s picture gallery.

So, what do you think?

Are we witnessing the dawn of the kill-bots?

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Tagged as: foster-miller, kill-bot, maars, QinetiQ, smart weapons, TALON, warbot