We live already in the era of the Cyborg. Our Humanities are practically indistinct from the Machine. Functions of our bodies such as communicating, remembering, recognizing each other, our personal and shared memories and most of our works are now indivisible from the functions of the machines.
“In the longer term, fully robotic soldiers may be developed and deployed, particularly by wealthier countries,” the paper says (thankfully, no plans to add ‘living tissue’ on the outside are mentioned).
The study thus foresees the Pentagon playing a largely supervisory role over autonomous machines as increasingly central to all dimensions of warfare—from operational planning to identifying threats via surveillance and social media data-mining; from determining enemy targets to actually pursuing and executing them.