The Marines are already hard at work developing low-cost swarmbots that can thwart cheap and effective enemy drones.The Navy is hurrying along a robo-boat designed to seek out hard-to-detect diesel-electric submarines on missions lasting up to three months at sea. It’s not armed, but it is autonomous — more than your garden-variety drone can say for itself.

With drones and other device-powered weapons, quasi-robots are already part of the battle space. Meanwhile, even ostensibly “civilian use” robots can pose a dramatic threat, especially, of course, when hacked. Put two and two together, and the only surefire way to prevent robots from going to war is to shut down robotics. And that is not going to happen.

As signatory and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak noted: “If we build these devices to take care of everything for us, eventually they’ll think faster than us and they’ll get rid of the slow humans to run companies more efficiently.”