The Hunters Cometh
Mob Mentality
Robots in the military aren’t a new thing — they’ve been used to detect land mines, and more importantly, go where no man would want to go. But the trouble with these robots is that in using one robot, you also use up one human, which isn’t ideal. The whole point of a robotic army is to remove humans as far as possible, so one human per robot is pretty inefficient resource utilisation. What if one human could command a whole team of robots?
Let us call this Stipulation One. Stipulation One is that the US Department of Defence has put out a call for a “software / hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.” Each robot is to weigh 100 kg, and will report to the human when there’s a “difficult decision” to be made.
Stipulation Two is that last year, iRobot signed a deal with Taser International to mount stun guns on military robots.
Finally, Stipulation Three is that when you bring robots, stun guns and “non-cooperative” human subjects together, no good can come of it.
Now, what conclusions can we draw from these stipulations? Firstly, that the US military is apparently quite interested in getting themselves robotic hunting packs. Secondly, that they don’t mind giving these robots stun guns. To extrapolate a bit, it’s possible that they don’t mind machine guns, either.
Obviously, we are all doomed. The top brass of the US Military has clearly been replaced by Combine Advisors, for the product they aim to create exists already: