Rise of the killer robots: The future of war

The recent tit-for-tat missile strikes between US and Iran show how war has changed in the 21st century. Technology has brought new capabilities for killing at a distance, and what we are seeing today with long-range, so-called "precision missiles" is a harbinger of the next generation of warheads. Autonomous weaponry and "killer robots" sound like the stuff of science fiction but various governments including the US and Russia are investing heavily in their development. Turkey has teamed up with a defence contractor to deploy kamikaze drones with biometric facial recognition to the Syrian border this year, while the Israeli-developed Harpy "loitering munition" – which hangs about in the sky looking for an unrecognised radar signal to strike – has been sold to several countries including India and China. For cloud computing expert Laura Nolan, this issue became personal in early 2018 when, while working for Google, she discovered the tech giant had secretively signed up to the US military's artificial intelligence project Maven.