Skynet will be flying drones, says Washington.

Some egghead says the eeeevile American military wants drones that kill people BY THEMSELVES!!!

Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.
"Before they were blind, deaf and dumb," Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force, told AFP. "Now we're beginning to make them to see, hear and sense."
Ronald Arkin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.

Ronald Arkin seems to have never heard about cruise missiles, which are really nothing other than autonomous drones which fly themselves to a chosen location and then blow the crap out of it.
In truth, there's really nothing stopping the Air Force from letting autonomous Predator drones from choosing their own targets. Its just that nobody so far has been stupid enough to turn one loose on its own with live ammo. Not what I would consider to be a really, you know, -safe- kind of thing to do even in a war zone.

They're computers. They screw up. Better that the screwups don't have high explosive attached to them, eh?

The Phantom