Perhaps unsurprisingly, science fiction references infused media coverage of the original meeting in May, just as a stock photo of Terminators attacking dressed up news coverage of Angela Kane’s remarks last week. The Wall Street Journal’s headline about the Experts’ Meeting read “It’s Judgment Day for Killer Robots at the UN” and included a “Robocop” still. Reuters used a similar headline and went with an image from “The Terminator.” A few reports used pictures of Cylons. At Mashable, readers were told: “The UN [is battling] killer robots. Yes, the robopocalypse might be coming.”

Snowden: The NSA's building Skynet to fight wars online

The real Skynet: New NSA autonomous weapons system intercepts threats and retaliates automatically

Self-driving cars sounds great until you start to think about it. The results over robots taking jobs over has created a split in the scientific community. Forty-eight percent of respondents say that they will destroy more jobs than they create. Fifty-two percent have the opposing view

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

In a move echoing the apocolyptic situation played out in the Terminator series of films, the US government is handing over control of its nuclear stockpile to computers. In the Terminator films the US government develops a computer system called Skynet which is designed to have command over all computerised military hardware and systems, including America's entire nuclear weapons arsenal.

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Meet your new robot overlords

Over the past few years Google has made strides into robotics, artificial intelligence, self-driving vehicles... and that's just the secret projects we know about. Watching the pieces fall into place, it's hard to not see a certain pattern emerge. One that matches a familiar sci-fi world that filmmaker James Cameron first envisioned 30 years ago. One in which AI, robotics, and autonomous vehicles all unite in a winner-takes-all battle against humanity itself.

Google’s DC office is crammed to the brim with former spooks, intelligence officials and revolving door military contractors.