Future Robot Army Warriors

The U.S. military has made a major commitment to deploying and developing robots for use on the battlefield--from the highly successful bomb disposal robots, to the unmanned aerial vehicles.

Elon Musk has joined industry leaders to warn the United Nations about the dangers of killer robots.

With accurate and deadly that it virtually never misses its target and look at the difficulties of making military vehicles driverless.

The use of robots in warfare fits into some of the basic tenets of American fighting: to reduce manpower with material and to kill the enemy either at a distance or with a surrogate soldier.

Elon Musk, along with over 100 robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) leaders, has written an open letter to the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons warning about "killer robots".

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Rocket carrying an experimental Army strike weapon exploded early Monday after taking off from a launch pad in Alaska

In fact, they are already being tested by militaries across the world.

The SGR-A1 robots, developed jointly by Samsung Techwin and Korea University, can automatically detect North Korean soldiers walking over the border and could technically fire without the help of a human.

While the suggestion of killer robots conjures images from science fiction such as the Terminator’s T-800 or Robocop’s ED-209, lethal autonomous weapons are already in use. Samsung’s SGR-A1 sentry gun, which is reportedly technically capable of firing autonomously but is disputed whether it is deployed as such, is in use along the South Korean border of the 2.5m-wide Korean Demilitarized Zone.

The fixed-place sentry gun, developed on behalf of the South Korean government, was the first of its kind with an autonomous system capable of performing surveillance, voice-recognition, tracking and firing with mounted machine gun or grenade launcher. But it is not the only autonomous weapon system in development, with prototypes available for land, air and sea combat.