If you've dipped your toes into the deep waters of the tech world any time in the last decade, you'll know that technology has very slowly been stepping on the toes of doomsday plot lines from infamous sci-fi's. The story lines to much acclaimed sci-fi dramas such as Battlestar Galactica and the Terminator franchise is scarily and slowly coming true. Today it would appear that we've taken another step forward towards a cyborg apocalypse with the reports of an unmanned aerial drone going rogue over in Washington, USA.
A Northrup grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout UAV strayed into restricted US air space after it failed to adhere to it's built in failsafe protocols. Yup, that's right, it seemed to have ignored the safety guidelines hardcoded into it's software and decided to continue it's course into restricted airspace ... 23 miles that is, into restricted airspace.
It's believed that communications between the ground crew and the UAV "cut off" making the drone continue on it's path. Failsafe protocols were supposed to kick in at that point and make the drone circle the spot but it failed to do so. The error was put down in part due to a logic error in the software, something that most software engineers will agree is not the simplest thing to detect, especially on such high tech military hardware as is the case here. Just for your peace of mind, the MQ-8 UAV is in fact capable of not only performing surveillance tasks but also capable of carrying 70mm Hydra Rocket Pods or Hellfire Tankbuster missiles. That's enough to take out pretty much everything in a city block and then some. Now that's quite an example of software engineering gone horribly wrong. Here's a toast to the limited days of the human race. So say we all.
