McQ, over at QandO Blog, comments on a New York Times article about robot soldiers in a post titled “Robo War“.

Part of me says that it’s a cool idea — on the examples of those robots already being used (to dig up roadside bombs and scour caves), all of me thinks it’s a cool idea — but part of me shares McQ’s sense of “the willies” on this. His comparisons are to Terminator or the movie version of I, Robot, but those things don’t worry me much — that level of AI is far beyond what we can do now, I think.

What did send a shiver down my spine was this paragraph from the NYT piece:

Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development of nanotechnology – the science of very small structures – they may become swarms of “smart dust.” The Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up.

It wouldn’t take much intelligence for a swarm of “smart dust” to be dangerous. Michael Crichton’s novel Prey was more frightening than either of those movies (or any other killer-robot movies or books I can think of), and it makes one wonder if a swarm of nano-robots couldn’t be far more dangerous than a “life-sized” robot warrior.

Where McQ says that it’s possible that his doubts are a product of watching too much SciFi, it’s probable that mine are a result of Crichton’s novel (and, wasn’t there a John Saul novel that dealt with nano-tech, too?) and an overactive imagination.