In the immortal words of Stacker Pentecost, "Today we face the monsters that are at our door and bring the fight to them! Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!" Think Roombas with machine guns. Elon Musk has thought about it -- he thinks about it a lot -- and he's leading the charge to make sure the robot-filled apocalypse never gets to our door in the first place. Ahead of United Nations talks on the use on autonomous weapons systems in warfare -- drones, walking tanks with guns for hands, that kind of thing -- Musk and 116 experts from 26 nations signed an open letter urging the UN to create a government panel that can advise and warn where necessary. Once developed, lethal autonomous weapons will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend.