And Now: "The Killer Robots"
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times By Andrew E. Kramer Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine New York Times As Ukraine’s 35-year-old defense minister strolled about in tennis shoes, jeans and a fleece, gazing at displays of his country’s latest crop of oddball weapons, he paused to eye one gigantic, ungainly new device. It was a drone with muscular carbon fiber arms stretching eight feet to each side, propellers the size of scythes, and a sprawl of wires, protruding antennas and Velcro straps. The drone substitutes for a 155-millimeter howitzer, carrying shells to targets and dropping them. “Can you make it bigger?” the minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, asked the drone’s developers during a recent defense exhibition. They were working on it, they replied. The future of warfare is being written in Ukraine, and Mr. Fedorov, a technology evangelist who is four months into his job, is one of its authors. In the same way that apps remade taxi services and food delivery,...
