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Will Femia is a Weblog enthusiast who, through good fortune and dumb luck, was introduced to the form as his position as chat producer for MSNBC.com careered into obsolescence. On any given day, Will can be found having already spent an unhealthy amount of time squinting at a computer screen.

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Headline of the day

Posted: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 3:40 PM by Will Femia

Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert

Someday we'll look back and wish we'd found Sarah Connor.

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Comments

For those the robots are targeting now, the threat is real.  To the rest of us, the one's that "control" them, there isn't much of a threat at all.  They have to run out of ammo sometime and it's not like they can re-arm themselves...yet.

John, Chicago, IL (Sent Wednesday, February 27, 2008 4:15 PM)

Your buddy Allen Boyle was also talking about this on the Cosmic Log

Nadeem Cokar (Calgary, AB) (Sent Wednesday, February 27, 2008 4:41 PM)

Fox news also did a story about this.  I am amused by the picture that they used in their article http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,333091,00.html

Alicia, Minneapolis, MN (Sent Wednesday, February 27, 2008 5:42 PM)

Too quote said professor: "It would be great if all the military were robots and they could fight each other" and "Imagine the miners' strike with robots armed with water cannon".

Why bother with robots when child-soldiers and IEDs are more cost effective?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/27/sharkey_robot_terrorists/

P. Lee, Chicago, IL (Sent Wednesday, February 27, 2008 5:57 PM)

Lol, I love that Fox used a dialek (or however it's spelled) as a picture.  Exterminate!

Dave (Sent Wednesday, February 27, 2008 11:41 PM)

It's funny (funny weird, not funny haha) that they think terrorists would want to use robots to do 'suicide' bombing.  As strange as it may sound, I think that idealogically, it's easier to get somebody to strap some explosives to his chest and stroll into a marketplace, then it is to give someone a remote control and have him drive a robot into a group of women and children.

Tim, Albuquerque, NM (Sent Thursday, February 28, 2008 6:28 PM)

Regarding robots and terrorists, I remember back in the '80s when I worked with a large number of airplane geeks/pilots in the space program and the cruise missile was a hot topic in Aviation Week, the discussion went along the same lines as this one.  The Jihadist already had cruise capacity, all they needed to do was find a guy willing to do a suicide mission and teach him the basics of flying an airplane.  Every time someone references Condi Rice's "Who would have thought..." comment, inside I'm yelling "We did, we did!".  Funny how it took them 15 years to realize it.

KRW (Sent Thursday, February 28, 2008 10:06 PM)



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