Robotics juggernaut seen as unstoppable

The use and proliferation of robotic systems by the U.S. military will likely continue unabated because they offer far more advantages than disadvantages, reports the Atlantic.

Mariarosaria Taddeo, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, who was interviewed by the Atlantic, notes in her research that the U.S. government deployed about 150 robotic weapons in Iraq in 2004, but that number had grown to 12,000 by 2008.

The use of robotic systems by the United States military and other nations will likely continue to expand because robotic systems are cheaper than traditional weapons, lessen the risk of human casualties and enable the contemplation of military operations that would have previously been considered too risky. The downside of the widespread use of robotics in Iraq and Afghanistan was that the population of those countries was reluctant to trust U.S. forces because they viewed them as overly dependent on machines to fight their wars, she said in the article.

"From a political and military perspective, the advantages of these weapons outweigh the disadvantages quite heavily," she said.