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That image comes from the Queensland University of Technology. Engineers there have designed a robot sub that can autonomously swim around in the ocean and hunt sea stars. Here is a video of it finding, identify and killing a sea star.
That’s right. There’s a robot sub right now, patrolling the waters around Australia, identifying objects then indiscriminately killing them by injecting them with poison.
Sooo… HOW THE FUCK COULD THIS BACKFIRE?
Sea stars, you see, are damaging coral reefs around Australia. To save the reefs, which host a number of species and are important to overall ocean health, humans invented water terminators. They are only designed to recognize sea stars, and only kill sea stars. That’s comforting. Not.
Here’s are the sub’s inventors, talking to IEEE Spectrum. I’ve taken the liberty of replacing the word ‘sea star’ with the word ‘people.’
(A new kind of) one-shot poison (which is harmless to everything else) is what makes autonomous robotic people control possible, since it means that a robot can efficiently target individual people without having to try and keep track of which ones it’s injected already so it can go back and repeat the process nine more times. At Queensland University of Technology in Australia, a group of researchers led by Matthew Dunbabin and Peter Corke spent the last decade working on COTSBot, which has been specifically designed to seek out and murder people as mercilessly and efficiently as possible.
[H/T Boing Boing]