Blade Runner 2020: Are We There Yet?

First a recent DARPA video shows how a swarm of drones would be carrying out an urban exercise:

Second, special operations describes their “future fights” training as assessing trustworthiness of partners in the field:

..instructors hear a gunshot echo in the woods. An extrajudicial killing ‘is obviously not ideal,’ one Special Forces instructor said.

Add these two together and you get special operators dropping into urban areas to identify and ultimately eliminate untrustworthy partners, which obviously means drones in the near future.

That pretty much sounds like the thesis of Blade Runner, which is finding presence of machines that lack empathy and then eliminating them. The tough question being, as the instructor said, is an assessment of imminent harm judicial or scientific enough to warrant hitting the off button?

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