We have witnessed how quickly AI has advanced, and these advancements will accelerate the near-term future of autonomous weapons. Not only will these killer robots become more intelligent, more precise, faster, and cheaper; they will also learn new capabilities, such as how to form swarms with teamwork and redundancy, making their missions virtually unstoppable. Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police State. Govcorp truthers today are such chickenshit bores - but you knew that. "... One of the stories in my new “scientific fiction” book based on realistic possible-future scenarios, AI 2041, which I co-wrote with the sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan, describes a Unabomber-like scenario in which a terrorist carries out the targeted killing of business elites and high-profile individuals..." https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/09/i-weapons-are-third-r...