pic nicked from here

Scientists at the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) Project are working on a steam powered battlefield robot.  It’s fueled by whatever organic matter it might find. Meaning corpses. Human corpses.

I can understand why humans might be upset by this. It is, after all, usually taboo for them to eat each other. But why should a robot share that moral scruple?  Organic matter is organic matter.  And to the hungry robot, all meat looks like a meal.

It must be difficult, if not impossible, to program a robot to tell the difference between dead human and dead whatevers – especially when one thinks about all the different shapes that exploded human meat can take.  Perhaps they could adapt that wine tasting robot to determine what’s human and what isn’t but, frankly, that’s expensive.

That tech/cash would be better used/spent conducting important research into what wine best goes with what human in what state of decomposition. (There even could be a robot lifestyle magazine on the subject: “Human Eating Robot Wine Connoisseur.”)  This hard-won information  could be relayed into the robot sommeliers of our cannibal descendants so that they might better recommend a decent Cabernet Sauvington to go with a top-shelf meal of Gin Ripened Hobo-Livers.

As for the rest of this creature, it seems like a matter of cobbling together already existing inventions rather than creating anything new. Robot jaws for chewing organic matter, complete with saliva, were invented some time ago and even organically powered robots are nothing new. There’s one that eats flies.

The only real problem with this creature’s diet is that it might offend the sensibilities of your enemies or even your own soldiers.  Some might be bothered at the prospect of being eaten by a robot. It may conflict with their religious views or their vision of warfare.  But, if the west was concerned about that sort of thing, they wouldn’t be using drones to blow up villagers in Pakistan.  After all, these strikes are seen as cowardice at best and insensibly cruel at worst.

Robots are an unpopular tactic.  In the popular imagination, they conjure up this sort of image.

But, in war, the important thing is not popularity.  It’s to avoid fighting the war in the first place and, if it proves absolutely unavoidable,  to win it by any means necessary.  Most of those means are awful.  That’s why you avoid war.  It’s never clean, never pretty and it’s just about the dumbest shit that humans can ever possibly do.

So it doesn’t really matter that this robot eats humans.  That there are dead humans laying around for it to eat is what should be of concern.  I doubt those corpses much care whether they’re eaten by man, machine, maggot or crow.

As for me –self-appointed spokesman for the living–  I see this as all part of that Lion King Circle of Life. You come from dirt and plants, you live, you die, a flying robot kills you, a rolling one eats you, and it turns you into robot shit so that the cycle can  start all over again.

It’s all very mystical and beautiful.