As a long-standing Cassandra warning of the upcoming robot rebellion, I felt a chill today when I read the following two stories:
- The US Navy is looking into using 3D printing on aircraft carriers to improve the supply chain by printing weapons on demand
- The same US Navy successfully flew and landed its F-18-sized drone, the X-47B, from an aircraft carrier
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how the combination of 3D printing and autonomous weapons could eventually become the Von Neumann machine of our nightmares.
I feel very confident that I’m going to win my apocalypse bet (that the robot rebellion comes sooner than the uplifted monkey uprising). Too bad I’ll be too dead to collect!