Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

All this talk about military robots, and Homeland Security drones sounds like a bunch of science fiction. Even as I write about it, I think to myself, “This sounds like some kind of weird conspiracy theory involving tinfoil hats.”

For that reason, to accompany our articles about the threat of military drones, I think it’s important to offer our readers some simple photographic evidence of what’s going on. Here’s one pixel from that larger picture:

This photograph comes from the White House archives, and it shows President George W. Bush and his Secretary of Homeland Security standing right in front of a robotic airplane. The official seal of the Department of Homeland Security is shown on the robot.

Our Irregular writer Jim is in the middle of writing a series on the problematic development of robots that can fight our wars for us, slaughtering human enemies so that our soldiers don’t have to see the blood firsthand. It will be like they’re just playing a video game, shooting people from a remote location.

This isn’t some kind of Isaac Asimov science fiction ethical thought experiment. It’s a present reality. We have robotic airplanes in the skies, and now, there are robot dogs on the ground, capable of taking a solid blow and keeping on going. There would be little problem equipping these military drone dogs with guns – they could take the recoil with barely slowing down.

The following are some videos of some prototypes of these military robots, walking across any terrain, running, even jumping, with the relentless ability to just keep on coming toward their target with no fear, and no mercy.