LONG BEACH (California), Feb 5: Robots will be armies of the future in a case of fact catching up to fiction, a researcher told an elite gathering on Wednesday.

Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle would save lives of military personnel, the move had the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.

“What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?” Singer predicts that US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.

The US Army already recruits soldiers using a custom war videogame. And attack drones and bomb-handling robots are common in battle zones.

Robots not only have no compassion or mercy, they insulate living soldiers from horrors that humans might be moved to avoid.

“The United States is ahead in military robots, but in technology there is no such thing as a permanent advantage,” Singer said.

“You have Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran working on military robots.” There is a ‘disturbing’ cross between robotics and terrorism, according to Singer, who mentioned a website that lets visitors detonate improvised explosive devices from home computers.—AFP