Long Beach (California): Robots will be armies of the future in a case of science fact catching up to fiction, a researcher told an elite TED gathering.
Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.
"We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb," Singer said.
"What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?"
Singer predicts that US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.
The US Army already recruits soldiers using a custom war videogame, and some real-world weapon controls copy designs of controllers for popular videogame consoles.
Attack drones and bomb-handling robots are already common in battle zones.
Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.
"The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage," Singer said. "You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots."