I wasn’t concerned about warbots. Until...
The quote is long to provide context, but the bold part is what worries me. Ruh-roh.
A recent study prepared for the Office of Naval Research by a team from the California Polytechnic State University said that robot ethics had not received the attention it deserved because of a "rush to market" mentality and the "common misconception" that robots will do only what they have been programmed to do.
"Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to the time when computers were simpler and their programs could be written and understood by a single person," the study says. "Now programs with millions of lines of code are written by teams of programmers, none of whom knows the entire program; hence, no individual can predict the effect of a given command with absolute certainty since portions of programs may interact in unexpected, untested ways. "
It’s not bad enough that we’re giving the robots guns, we’re not entirely sure what they’ll do when we tell them to shoot.