<![CDATA[io9: robot wars]]> http://tags.lifehacker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: robot wars]]> http://io9.com/tag/robotwars http://io9.com/tag/robotwars <![CDATA[Our New Front In The War On Hell: Giant Robots]]> As if being murdered and then brought back to (un)life by a demon from Hell as a zombie superhero out for revenge wasn't bad enough, Todd McFarlane's Spawn is about to go through his most extreme transformation yet - into a giant robot. As part of October's new Robot Wars line of toys, McFarlane is taking his once-popular hellbound superhero in a more mecha direction.




The new line sets up a brand-new setting for the character. According to the publicity for the toys,

The historic 35th line of SPAWN action figures makes the leap to the year 3047, when a heroic team of robot warriors fights to defend Earth from the unstoppable force of the villainous Mechanoid Army.

Mechanoid Army? 3047? What's that got to do with Martin Sheen overacting like crazy, that's what I want to know. Still, at least they look cool, which is probably the main thing.

Spawn Series 35: Robot Wars [Spawn.com]

]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5040802&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Killer Robots Coming Soon to a City Near You]]> We all know that robots can be produced en masse and programmed to kill. According to robot expert Noel Sharkey, who spoke at the UK's leading defense study institution, RUSI, 4,000 robots were deployed in the Iraq War, but they were all "dumb machines with very limited sensing capability." Apparently, they can't tell the difference between civilians and terrorists. Not very useful. But the next generation will be an improvement.

The US will be spending a whopping $24 billion on unmanned systems technology by 2013, and I'm guessing that at least a fraction of this cost is going towards robot intelligence—i.e. programming them to figure out who to kill, what weapon to use, and when to take one for the team. Plus we've just gotten word of a security warning about a new generation of robot armies hailing from countries like India, China, Israel, and Russia. This could be the forecast of a serious all-out bot-on-bot international war. Stay tuned. Image by Foster Miller

Will Robots Replace Suicide Bombers? [MSN News]

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