Large quantities of smart weapons — especially miniaturized, robotic weapons and intelligent, target-seeking ammunition without reliable remote off-switches could lead to unexpected injury to combatants and civilians, destruction to infrastructure, and environmental pollution.
As a contributor to a report on "Potential Environmental Pollution and Health Hazards Resulting from Possible Military Uses of Nanotechnology," we submitted the issue above. To some people, this sounds like science fiction, but it is rapidly coming closer to reality...
British researchers are turning to Linux and embedded processors to build a fleet of tiny, robotic helicopters capable of swarming like angry bees and evaluating their surroundings with a single hive mind.
The University of Essex's UltraSwarm project is an experiment in swarm intelligence and wireless cluster computing that might one day spawn military surveillance applications. In one scenario, a flock of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, with video cameras could take in a hostile landscape from a variety of angles and process the image locally, in the sky.
These airborne bots are not nano-enabled yet, of course, but they are part of a clear trend that could end in the scenario at the top of this post.