The latest request from the Pentagon is a multi-robot pursuit system for ground and sea use.  The objective would be to develop a software and sensor package to enable a team of robots to search for and detect human presence in an indoor environment.  Will this robot army turn out to be more Phantom Menace than Terminator and how much do we humans need to worry?

“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

“This is a clear step towards one of the main goals of the US Army’s Future Combat Systems project, which aims to make a single soldier the nexus for a large scale robot attack. Independently, ground and aerial robots have been tested together and once the bits are joined, there will be a robot force under command of a single soldier with potentially dire consequences for innocents around the corner.”

If this comes to fruition, there will still be a human at the controls of the pack of robots.  While this is horrifying to think of in the first place, we need to think about the inevitable evolution of such a project.  Once the human is eliminated and the system becomes fully autonomous, then we seriously need to contemplate a terminator type scenario.

Since it will probably be 30 years before something like this is fully autonomous, I’ll be retired and hopefully have moved to an uninhabited island to starve to death in peace.

Then again, if the robots win we’ll have to listen to techno and we’ll need this book to learn to survive.