The threat we don't face from robots

From an article on military robots (via Sullivan)

Washington plans to spend four billion dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense’s Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don’t know why that has not happened already," he said.

Why haven’t terrorists already started using robots?  Hm... difficult question.   

Could it be, I don’t know, that most terrorist groups are labor and not capital intensive and thus are using suicide bombing and IEDs as a low-cost form of stealth technology.  Unless the U.S. military has found a cheap way to deploy Transformers technology robotics doesn’t fill that niche. 

Admittedly robots are easier to capture than say missiles, but taken over remote control of one hardly gives you the ability to mass produce them.  There was a cool sequence in Once Upon a Time in Mexico where an insurgent used a remote control car to deliver to deliver an explosive, but somehow I think the terrorists already have access to that level of tech.

Robots capable of killing without a human in someway pulling the trigger are definitely worrisome.  However, terrorists or insurgents deploying robot armies is not why they’re worrisome.  If you want to read a real article about robots in the battlefield, try here.