Killer robots

That's not a low-budget Terminator remake. I wish it was. Also, 7 other things worth knowing today.

A few months ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency reached a milestone in a test at Fort Campbell, which is a big Army base on the Tennessee-Kentucky border.

The project they were working on is called the OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) program, and it involves building drones, quadcopters, and other vehicles with technology that allows a single person to control—well, as the name implies, to control a swarm of them—all at once.

In November, they pulled it off, with one person controlling 130 different vehicles at the same time, “creating and sharing information visible not just to the human operator but to other people on the same network,” as one report put it.

As the report went on: “If the experiment can be replicated outside the controlled settings of a test environment, it suggests that managing swarms in war could be as easy as point and click for operators in the field.”

I don’t know about you, but this kind of scares the heck out of me.

On the one hand, we h…