Anyone still remembers when they said they would never use dog robots for weapon/war purposes? I do. Things always age like milk and it's unsurprising.
Boston Dynamics said that, and they have stuck to that commitment. IIRC it's even in the contract when you buy a robot from them that you will not equip it with a weapon.
This article is about Ghost Robotics, which has never made such a commitment. They are known to supply gun-equipped robots to governments at all levels.
Well, yeah. That was the goal of creating all of these.
Hell, Boston Dynamics was originally funded heavily by DARPA. BigDog, AlphaDog, LittleDog, and LS3 were all funded by DARPA and designed for military use.
I recently visited the Boston Museum of Science where they have one of the Boston Dynamics robodogs on display, and they did a live demo with q&a. All I could think of the whole time was that one black mirror episode...
Only thing shocking about this is that it took this long. Any drone capable of carrying a weapon was going to get one. I mean, look at Ukraine right now. Consumer drones with soda bottle improvised explosives and cardboard drones. I can see a future where most warfare is drone vs drone, to see who can hit the other's supply lines / storage first.
The way Russia's turtling with illegal mines, drones are basically one of the only ways to attack without taking massive losses while also moving slowly and being sitting ducks for artillery.
The future will never be about drone vs drone, as no one cares about the drones.
They have to hit where it hurts, which is human life.
Best case scenario, wars will be fought over drone command centres. Much more probably drones will be used to increase civilian suffering to end the wars.
Automation is the big deal. Drones have cameras so humans can make a (hopefully) informed disision to strike or not. When (read; now) the drone doesn't need a camera because it can make the call without a human in the loop, we have removed a vital bottleneck.
The only thing that stopped WWI from being total war is that when we wipped out an entire generation, we needed time to grow more troops. If autonomous weapons being manufactured autonomously by autonomously constructed factories... whoever controled the drones could of conquered the world.
No, that assumes that resources and energy are unlimited. This is the main problem with any "grey goo" scenario.
And it wasn't people being killed that stopped WW2. People are killed in every war. The defensive weaponry was more powerful than the offensive weaponry. Machine guns were only used on defense because they were heavy. Also, artillery was not mechanized so it was hard to move everything forward quickly.