Killer Robots Bite Back (with a helpful educational website)

Some years ago, back in grad school, I asked one of my fellow students what he was working on. "I'm working on building robots," he told me, "Robots that fly around and can bite people." At the time, I was a bit taken aback by this, and I took some consolation from the fact that educational theory, my own subject, had somewhat less direct destructive potential.


As it turned out, however, my colleague had picked an excellent dissertation topic--as of 2012, the robots that bite (and that do rather more than bite) have been proliferating. One might say, in fact, that we are well into the era of the killer robot. Naturally, not everyone is overjoyed about this. What with this business of unmanned aircraft wiping people out left and right, people are starting to see these 21st century engineering marvels as harbingers of the surveillance society. As a result, drones have a bit of a PR problem.