UK Robotics Professor Kevin Warwick said: “This is an incredibly important milestone, but anyone who thinks this is not dangerous has got their head in the sand.

“We do not know what these bots are saying. Once you have a bot that has the ability to do something physically, particularly military bots, this could be lethal.”

Here’s the full piece.

I interviewed Warwick about 10 years ago in a piece about the rise of the machines.

“I think some of the time people like to write books with Hollywood endings and the Hollywood ending is that humans will be all right because robots can’t make a cup of coffee,” he said.

“If you say in the book that humans will all die off, no one wants to read that. Even Terminator gets crushed in the end. In reality it’s not the Terminator that gets crushed – it’s the humans that get crushed.”

Here’s my piece.

And for an exciting read in a world not yet dominated by machines, try Game Of Killers: The Spartan as an ebook or paperback.