I won’t hesitate to point out that “robots”, i.e. the predator drone are already dropping bombs; with devastating effect I might add. You can only be so precise with a Hellfire Missile.

It is the mind set that forms the crux of the problem, not the methods; in my opinion. Until force can be used with more precise discretion, it should be curtailed.

The fact that our applications of force have been wildly irresponsible, a la “Shock and Awe”; demonstrates our lack of ability to show restraint. Deploying a partially automated, robotic, cluster weapons system is going to be highly problematic. No, really…

Perhaps with the present Pentagon general mindset, they worry about losing control of the ‘human’ as was discovered during a human testing by professor Philip G. Zimbardo, the negative effect found to be degeneracy that he describes in his work he entitled the ‘Lucifer Effect’.

The generals and admirals and whomever else of rank who guide these arch designs on other people’s death or incarceration, no doubt gain massive vicarious stimulation from the empowerment of the making of “…a single soldier the nexus for a large scale robot attack”.

The Strangelovean echoes of this sort of thinking are so obvious that it strains the imagination that more people cannot be flatly horrified by the implications of the creation of such a system. The tangential effects of something like this are plainly ruinous.

To literally create a robotic system which will execute the worst of our common instincts, by being linked to the fragile moral and emotional state of a single combat soldier? The folly of that is breathtaking. Just when you think homo sapiens has found itself in a deep enough hole that it might actually consider stopping digging and to begin to climb out.

I do not express these, obvious, concerns as some sort of…oil lamp luddite. I am, in fact, an enthusiastic user and appreciator of technology and its contingent benefits. It is perhaps because I am generally pro-technology, that I am able to perceive the rank foolishness inherent in allowing it to be used to project our inner demons outward with ever greater efficiency. The “ghost in the machine” is us, and we should tread very lightly indeed before we give it even more free reign than we already have.