Prominent Australians Have Obviously Been Watching Terminator

The Australian has awakened to the implications of making robots completely autonomous and then giving them lots of guns. Professor Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield raised the red flag recently, and gets the official Apoloblogology "Wait Up, My Scientific Friends, Let's Stop And Think About This For A Second" award for discussing the implications that these technologies could have on both the War on Terror and the War on Skynet:

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.

But even more worrisome, he said, was the subtle progression from the semi-autonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

"I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me,'' Prof Sharkey said.

My guess is that before a fellow like Professor Sharkey can start programming Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics into these things, he will have already been killed by some robot made by a less ethical and more money driven scientist than himself. Professor Sharkey, consider yourself welcome in my bunker when the Cylons come.