The killer robot drones are coming

Once this technology proves its efficacy, its proliferation will be unstoppable. So why is California welcoming them?

Photo by Dose Media on Unsplash

by Justin Rosario

There’s an obligatory scene in almost every disaster film where someone realizes something very bad is coming. The first astronomer to see a faint comet through their telescope. The first hiker to notice a bit of lava oozing out of the side of a supposedly inactive volcano. The little kid at the beach watching the water receding from the shoreline.

Most of the time, this witness to impending doom runs screaming to the nearest group of people. Sometimes they listen, and sometimes they don’t. The disaster almost always occurs anyway. In the ongoing disaster film that is America in the 21st Century, we are now past the running and screaming part and have arrived at the beginning stages of the disaster unfolding.

Naturally, California, the state legendary for its natural disasters, is leading the way with a manmade one. ZME Science has the details of this shitty Hulu movie come to horrible life: 

On Tuesday, San Francisco supervisors voted to give the city’s police the ability to use potentially lethal robots in certain emergency situations. These killer robots could be remote-controlled drones packed with explosives that can neutralize a threat after other alternatives for force or de-escalation tactics have failed.

After a heated debate, the decision to grant the police the authority to deploy lethal robots was made with an 8-3 majority.

What could possibly go wrong? Besides, obviously, everything?