If you thought things weren't strange enough, it looks like it will get even stranger. The military is about to deploy Robots armed with machine guns and RPG's. As per the announcement:
The Army next March will begin to deploy Talon robots from Waltham, Mass.-based Foster-Miller. The robots will be mounted with M240 or M249 machine guns, said a Foster-Miller spokesman. The units also can be mounted with a rocket launcher. Defense agencies have been testing an armed version of the Talon since 2003.
This might be a good thing from the perspective of saving lives of soldiers, but one has to wonder if this will result in more civilian deaths since the person-to-person element is removed, and everything becomes clinical.
"Driving, observing and shooting are always done with a man in the loop," the Foster-Miller spokesman said. "The labs like autonomy, but the users themselves always like to have control."
Full story here.