Here Comes Judgement Day, Robot Invasion!

Except for the invention of the time machine, everything else is running as smooth as the script of the Terminator series, don't you agree? You know, building robots, then equipping robots with guns, then ever increasing artificial intelligence, so that in the end we lose control over them and total annihilation breaks loose. Yep, pretty smooth! And another thing, didn't we all swear this would never happen? Why is the opposite taking place?

OK, maybe I've exaggerated a bit, let's say robots won't become self aware anytime soon, however they could still fall in the hands of some angry terrorists pissed off for no apparent reason. Professor Noel Sharkey
from the University of Sheffield agrees: "Robots pose a great threat to humanity!" Robots are already being used all over the world in military operations, carrying military equipment, starting with mobile grenade launchers all the way to rocket-firing drones, and can identify human targets on their own.

In Iraq alone, the place of one of the bloodiest military conflicts of the moment, have been deployed more than 4,000 robots, including unmanned aircraft vehicles with more flight hours that a single human can ever experience. Some of the first armed robots have been sent into the territory of Iraq in the summer of last year, carrying large-caliber machine guns and have been so successful in killing people, that the US Army ordered the Foster-Miller manufacturer to build another 80.

Until now, all the automated killing machines have been controlled remotely by human personnel, however it seems only a matter of time before the military decides to give them full autonomy. Why? It might have something to do with human greed and the fact that autonomous vehicles are cheaper to manufacture.

Various countries around the world have already been investing massive amounts of money into the development of new robot warriors, amongst which the US, South Korea, Israel, China, India, Russia and the UK. The US alone is planning to spend about four billion dollars by the year 2010, in order to develop autonomous combat vehicles.

According to James Canton of the Institute for Global Futures, by the end of the next decade, robots would be so largely used in military conflicts that a single detachment could be formed of 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots. This is a worrying perspective, albeit even more terrifying is the idea that such killing machines would be able to take decisions without the approval of a human being.

Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology says that the shift towards total artificial intelligence autonomy is practically unstoppable in the current context of global thinking. But this does not necessarily have to be a bad thing, considering that robots cannot be influenced by emotions and could keep a clearer judgement than most people. The most serious problem is that robots cannot make a distinction between enemy, civilian or friendly combatants, or to respond in concordance with the rules stated in the Geneva Convention.

Time may solve all the barriers currently standing in the way of the creation of truly autonomous robots, meanwhile the US Department of Defense has recently invested about 230 billion dollar in the Future Combat Systems program, which will have the role of developing aerial and land-based robotic systems. What the world needs right now is a total ban on the use of autonomous weapons systems through an international agreement.