“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.
Darpa has become one of the biggest backers of robotics research. Yet autonomous robots bring their own powerful ethical dilemmas. If machines are given guns, it opens profound moral and legal questions about war ..
“As a colleague of mine likes to say, robots are assholes,”.
Researchers also argue that the more dystopian predictions about machines and war underestimate the affinity between humans and robots.