Beware the drones
Sir: Well said, Daniel Suarez (‘Drone warfare is coming,’4 August). These flying killing machines we call drones are a menace to humanity. We had better wake up to the threat they pose before it’s too late.Anybody with a cursory knowledge of pop culture can tell you what happens when automatons develop the intelligence to make ‘kill decisions’. The consequences are not pretty. (If you need reminding, watch the Matrix, or Terminator.) But it seems our cleverest engineers — and the people in power who pay them — are either unfazed by such concerns or nerdily eager to turn fantasy into reality.
Perhaps, in fact, the trouble is that people are too quick to think of fighting robots as existing within the realm of science fiction. We are so familiar with the concept of machines turning on their human makers — the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wearily called it the ‘Frankenstein complex’ — that we dismiss our fears about real-life, actual drones and kill-bots.
Mark Wardrop
Berkshire
Sir: Speaking as a paranoiac, I have to say that your cover article about drones hasn’t helped. Now when an insect appears at the window I shall always be wondering: is that a fly or a spy? Seems a bit unkind but I may decide to err on the side of caution and swat it regardless.
Thomas Glass
Hereford
The curse of statistics
Sir: Martin Vander Weyer identifies the greatest curse of modern statistics: their universal use in support of almost every argument (‘GDP figures tell only part of the story’, 4 August 2012). In observing that ‘the more detailed and authoritative the forecast, the higher the chance it will turn out to be a load of old cobblers’, he restates what, in June 1961, Dr E.F.
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