DEAR LORD THE TERRORDOMES ARE COMING

Videotime, get your canned food and airguns ready, this is one of the headlines on the BBC news website:

Call for debate on killer robots

An international debate is needed on the use of autonomous military robots, a leading academic has said.

Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield said that a push toward more robotic technology used in warfare would put civilian life at grave risk.

Technology capable of distinguishing friend from foe reliably was at least 50 years away, he added.

hat physical distance from the actual theatre of war, he said, led naturally to a far greater concern: the push toward unmanned planes and ground robots that make their decisions without the help of human operators at all.

The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and "proportionality", determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage.

"Robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability," he explained.

"They're not bright enough to be called stupid - they can't discriminate between civilians and non-civilians; it's hard enough for soldiers to do that.

"And forget about proportionality, there's no software that can make a robot proportional," he added.