I’m reading a CNN story on the DARPA-sponsored autonomous vehice/robot race across the Mojave desert over the weekend…. a contest which I believe is ultra-cool (but that’s just the geek in me). But there’s a line in the story that say…

“The vehicles, guided by sophisticated software, gave scientists hope that robots could one day wage battles without endangering soldiers.”

… and it got me thinking: if someone is waging a battle with their robot army against another nation/side with a robot army, then what’s the point? To see who’s robots are the best? I’m certainly not condoning war, but I always assumed one of the “points” was to hurt the other side, and to me the biggest hurt would be to lose the lives of soldiers or civilians. How is bringing down their robots really going to hurt them? Or is what they are really saying is, “We can hurt their humans (be they soldier or civilian) and not be hurt ourselves.”

Such a curious beast it is.