You may think we’re still a few years away from the point when T-800s prowl the battle field, looking for human skulls to crush underneath their robotic heels, but think again: today, right now, one in every fifty soldiers in Afghanistan is a robot, not a human.
According to Lt. Col. Dave Thomspon, speaking to Wired, there are more than 2,000 robots on the ground fighting alongside human troops right now. These aren’t all Terminators, though: in fact, most of the robots in Afghanistan are still pretty dumb.
The first robots to really make in-roads into the armed forces were bomb-disposal robots, as seen in 2009’s The Hurt Locker. Designed to remotely disable dangerous explosives, these robots opened the flood gates for deploying automated, remote-controlled equipment for dangerous tasks that used to be performed by humans.
At first, these statistics seem pretty exciting, but experts seem less than thrilled by the prospects of robots replacing our troops. While numerous, the bottom line is existing robots are pretty dumb and prone to malfunction. Although remote control drones have been deployed successfully on air missions by the US Air Force, ground bots are slow, clumsy and dumb enough that they’re use is limited to missions where they can be closely supervised by humans.
In other words, ground robots aren’t about to be storming enemy bunkers laser rifles blazing anytime soon. Still, at least as far as transhuman equal opportunity is concerned, robots do seem to have reached one milestone in the annals of acceptance: if the 2% figure is true, robots are now about equal with Asian Americans when it comes to the Army’s demographic.
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