Killer Robots as Common as AK-47s?

A missile that decides where to strike. A ship that decides when to shoot. Androids that can do backflips. These autonomous weapons are your new killer robots.

They’re cheap enough that you can buy them off Amazon. They’ll soon be more common than AK-47s. And they can execute kill orders faster than we puny humans can comprehend.

Suicide Drone?

Take the Israeli Harpy drone. It floats around up there until it finds a radar source, such as a surface-to-air missile battery. Then it kamikazes that puppy into the Old Testament.

I wonder if they could make a drone that identifies people driving slowly in the fast lane and ridicule them until they pull over and let me pass?

Samsung has an autonomous sentry gun that is in use on the border between North and South Korea. Not to mention their Galaxy cellphones which explode all on their own.

Ban or Worship?

Elon Musk wants to ban them. But Wired says it’s not possible. Others have started a church to worship this kind of omnipotent AI, getting in on the ground floor for mercy-begging.

Uber just bought 24,000 self-driving cars. Facebook has a shadow profile on you, and — through its People You May Know feature (PYMK) — it knows everyone who’s ever known you.

Imagine the Hacks

What if an angry teen hacked self-driving cars to run people over? Or autonomous Tesla semis loaded with explosives to drive into buildings?

What if an ideologically-motived Bitcoin millionaire bought a thousand drones off of Amazon, equipped them with a thousand 3D-printed handguns and coded them up to autonomously troll Manhattan or Penn State’s 40,000-student campus using Chinese camera tech to individually and implacably identify, target and attack unarmed innocents with cold, robotic efficiency?

But just ten or a hundred of these DIY killer robots could do real damage before anyone was able to stop them. After all, what are campus cops or even NYPD going to do with autonomous drones that fire back?

Your Entire Social Network

Connect Facebook’s PYMK shadow profiles, and a terrorist group that threatens to kill you and everyone you’ve ever known, if you don’t stop speaking those inconvenient truths on Twitter.

Is it too late to get on this real-life Rama and boogie out of this solar system?

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash