Aerial drones have become a startlingly common sight on the battlefield. Ukraine, for instance, has been deploying a record number of them as global demand for the often inexpensive and relatively simple to launch devices surges.
But US-based firms are thinking far ahead, envisioning a dystopian “Terminator”-inspired future in which humanoid robot soldiers go to war on behalf of their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
Case in point, San Francisco-based tech company Foundation recently signed a $24 million Pentagon contract to do just that, as the Wall Street Journal reports. While the company’s flagship Phantom MK1 robot, an unsettling matte black apparition, doesn’t appear to be ready to hold a gun or run into open fire on its own any time soon, the Eric Trump-backed company is far from ruling out the idea.
When the tech progresses enough to allow robots to reason and adapt to their behavior, “instead of dropping a bomb in a building, you can send humanoids to actually walk inside that building and go directly to the target,” Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak told the WSJ.
