Letters | 11 August 2012

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.