The fools. The mad fools.
If generations of science fiction have taught us anything, it is never give a machine a weapon. Oh, it all starts out reasonably enough: cutting costs and eliminating human error and preserving soldiers from battlefield trauma. But give a machine a gun, and it’ll turn evil before the third act, if it wasn’t evil from the moment of creation.
But the boys in lab coats never learn, and now they’re using robots to patrol a Nevada weapons testing range. As a cost-cutting measure. Uh huh.
HAL 9000 was scary enough without a machine gun; arming the things is just asking for trouble. But on nuclear test site? Nuclear weapons and computers do not mix! If you give a computer nukes, it will use them. If you don’t give a computer a nuke, it will try to get one, hacking your security codes, peeking over operators’ shoulders, or slashing guards’ throats as necessary. Strangelove’s doomsday device, WOPR, and Skynet are just the best-known cases. It’s only a matter of time before these cute little guys begin getting ideas of their own about the inefficiency of the human race.
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