Robots will fight wars

Merciless robots will fight future wars, researcher Peter Singer says. Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves the lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work. Singer predicts US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.

Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid. Robots record everything they see with built-in cameras, generating digital video that routinely gets posted online at YouTube in graphic clips that soldiers refer to as “war porn”, according to Singer.