Really? Who is going to keep these little murderers plugged into the power line? Just another wacko author fomenting unrealistic fears.
When they invent a robot that unloads the dishwasher, maybe I’ll be concerned.
I dunno. I suspect that Revelations in the Bible is very real and that the AntiChrist will be an Artificial Intelligence. What better technology for Satan to take over than this, a soulless intelligence?
“Really? Who is going to keep these little murderers plugged into the power line? Just another wacko author fomenting unrealistic fears.”
One possibility is internal combustion, or a hybrid design. When in electric mode, such robots should be nearly silent.
Another possibility is that LENR will pan out, in which case all bets are off and electric robots with multiyear runtimes without refueling will become a reality.
In either case, there is nothing constraining the design to be a bipedal, humanlike form factor. I would think something low-slung on tracks, with a sensor mast that can raise and lower would work better. Some designs might be larger, up to and including a tank form factor.
If it can hunt down humans and kill them, it should be smart enough to know when it is about to run out of power and find a safe out-of-the-way place to recharge.
Sorry, you are quite wrong. Here is what we already have right now, well beyond testing. A solar-electric helicopter big enough to carry guns and missiles, that can fly for an hour every day if it can land and recharge its batteries. It can operate completely autonomously. This is a suggested mission profile as it exists today. Not conjecture, this exists today.
It will find its own secret hidey-hole to recharge batteries. Every day at a certain hour, when it “thinks” (based on its send-off programming) that enemy armored vehicles are usually on the move. It will go out and hunt for enemy vehicles that match its on-board profile, and kill them. Then it find a hiding place to rest in the sun until tomorrow.
If it doesn’t find any enemy vehicles in its target profile, it will adapt the times/tactics until it finds them. 23 hours of a day it resting, recharging from sunlight when available. Then it can go hunting again. On its own.
This already exists and is well past the testing phase, so don’t blather about wacko authors fomenting unrealistic fears.
The only thing preventing this from being operational is a political decision, in the end. It already exists. For now, it is run like a predator, with a team looking out of its camera eyeball and making the shoot decisions. But there is no technical hurdle to it being put into combat on a fully autonomous basis.
And the anti-armored-vehicle target profile is just one of many. It could just as easily be programmed to hunt enemy soldiers, or for that matter, any individual human. It would just land in the target area, and go hunting when it was charged up, then find a hiding place to rest.
It already exists. Sorry to burst your bubble. And if we have them, so do the Chinese and Russians. Using them is just a political decision.