This lecture was originally presented by PW Singer at a recent TED conference. He presents a fascinating overview on the current state of military robotics.

The lecture is informative without taking a stance on whether this is good or bad. He clearly shows that we are in the midst of a fundamental changes in the way wars are fought similar to the way gunpowder, rifles, airplanes and atomic weapons changed warfare in the past and that this is the beginning of the next big change.

Singer speaks about the exponential rise in the number of robots in the military since thay were first introduced for reconnaissance and are now commonly deployed on the front lines of combat situations. This certainly puts valuable human lives out of harms way and I certainly support that point of view, but does it do so at the risk of sterilizing war and thereby dehumanizing the terrible facts of the battlefield (remember “Saving Private Ryan”) by reducing it to the likes of a video game? It is unnerving to think what the future will bring as computing power continues to rise at an exponential rate thereby making making robots ever more sophisticated and dare I say independent and self aware; a la “Skynet”.

While watching remember this is not a science fiction lecture about the future with some prototypes and concepts, this is what is actually deployed on the battlefield today. These are things we saw in sci-fi movies like Star Trek and Star Wars that depicted humans and droids in battle together. Reality is that that time has come.

I cannot imagine what we will see in the next decade. Will it take all the human emotion out of warefare? Is that a good thing? I do not know.

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