I've been thinking about this a lot recently. 20ish years ago I was jealous of the kids being born, because I thought of all the cool science and technology they'd live to see that I wouldn't. Now I feel very much the opposite.

I feel like it was to be expected sadly.

The military is a business and this is what they always wanted. Anyone working in robotics and AI and didn’t see a future like this coming was dreaming.

But yes. Not quite how parents are supposed to be preparing l kids for the weird future on the horizon.

This seems better to me than sending an entire generation of young men to die miles away from home. I imagine if a nations automated robot army gets decimated by another robot army they will surrender immediately rather than send their citizens in to get massacred.

Any nation with the capacity to build a robot army will also be socially mature enough to not want to commit robotic genocide against their surrendering foe. Although the current economic/resource subjugation that is done militarily might become more pronounced.

The far more likely future in my mind is countries using robots to automatically defend their borders from illegal immigrants/climate migrants.

When we have Texas already employing floating buzzsaws on their border it seems like if the technology is created it will inevitably be used.

>Any nation with the capacity to build a robot army will also be socially mature enough to not want to commit robotic genocide against their surrendering foe

Prediction: this will age badly.

It's not all that different from the Cold War, tbh. Robot dogs with guns seem much less scary to me than the possibility of small stars dropping out of the sky, wiping out millions of people in an instant and slowly poisoning the survivors.

Anyway, my kids worry more about climate change; correctly, I think.

Agreed. As a kid I vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm thinking that it had finally happened, the Soviets must have launched and the world was ending. I can’t really feel that scared about killer robots when an entire generation lived under the constant fear of nuclear extinction.

The nukes are still there and a war with Russia is still in progress.

That's what they said about atomic bombs and World War 3. People learned to sleep just fine. And don't forget that there was a baby boom after the war. Guess the Greatest Generation was made of sterner stuff than the zoomers.