Don't Fear the Robopocalypse

SCHARRE: This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it's one that gets often lost in the discussion and I think it's really important—I think in many situations, having some kind of remote weapons system would have been very valuable. Something that creates more distance, physical distance between a potential threat and a soldier. In particular, in insurgent and in guerrilla kinds of conflicts, there are a lot of really ambiguous situations where soldiers have to make split-second decisions. Someone's coming up on you and you're not sure if they might be a threat or not. It puts [soldiers] in a really difficult situation. They're balancing being worried about the potential harm that might come to them or their teammates if the person approaching them, say, has a suicide vest on, or is driving a car that's rigged full of explosives—versus maybe they're just an innocent civilian, just lost, or not paying attention. We encountered those kinds of situations all the time; [there was a] really bad suicide vest problem in the area [in Iraq where] I was in 2007 and 2008, during the peak of the war.