Armies of the Future | StarTalk

[Music] Rise of the robots.

I. This is a story that's never ending, heavily treated in science fiction platforms.

Uh, for all, for in all frontiers: servant robots, military robots, sex robots.

And maybe that's inevitable, given the direction technology and computing and artificial intelligence is going.

With regard to how much we might use a robot in war, such that you don't feel the pain, you don't bleed anymore because a machine is fighting for you.

That has been treated also.

There's an episode of Star Trek—we're in its 50th Anniversary this year—an episode of Star Trek where countries were fighting each other by computer.

And it would decide, "Okay, we won this battle, and we killed a hundred of you.

So now, send a hundred of you to this extermination chamber."

And that would be the consequence of the war fought by the computers.

And that's just kind of weird.

Where is the blood? Where is the pain? Where's the suffering?

So that you know not to do that again the next time.

And maybe the real solution here is not whether we ever have robots in the service of war.

Maybe we will mature sufficiently as a species so that any conversation about war would be purely historical.

Then we don't have to talk about military robots.

Maybe that's the future.

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