Imagine a world where shadowy forces in the government build murderous drones capable of hive-mind decision making, mimicking how ants attack and kill. Now imagine thousands of attacking drones, with multiple types of weaponry, passing information to each other by pheromones while in battle. Just like ants do.
It can’t happen here, you say? Don’t be too sure, especially about the part where rogue elements in the government build them to amass power for themselves.
Daniel Suarez writes about this in his third novel, Kill Decision. Once kill decisions get made by drones not humans, we enter very dark times indeed.
For thousands of years the “kill decision” during battle has remained in the hands of humans–and off-loading that responsibility to machines will bring unintended, possibly irreversible, consequences. But as forces even McKinney and Odin don’t understand begin to gather, and death rains down from above, it may already be too late to save humankind from destruction at the hands of our own technology.
As always, the war pigs don’t care what damage they do as long as they personally profit by it. Weaponized autonomous drones are precisely what they want.