Technology making battlefield safer or more dangerous?

Gun-Toting Robots May Fight Alongside Soldiers in Future Battles

There is new technology being developed that will one day allow for robots to accompany soldiers in war. According to the weapons manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, the robots will be able to carry equipment, fire weapons such as an M240 machine gun, spot an enemy up to 2 miles away and run for 20 hours on 3.5 gallons of fuel. The future has arrived. No longer will soldiers be put in harms way or have to carry their own equipment, they will have machines to do it for them. This is an obvious first reaction to impressive new technology such as this, but does it hide a deeper truth?

                                                                          When new technology comes out, people are often blinded by it's impressive capabilities and the ways in which it will make life easier. Often it does make life easier, but there is a price to pay. The iPhone allowed us to have the capabilities of a computer almost anywhere in the world at anytime. Yet we now see a new generation of people who are becoming more obsessed with cyber space than actual reality (See Video). The point isn't that technology is a bad thing. Without progress, the only option is regression. The point is that technology can often open up a pandora's box of problems that it had originally sought to fix.

The caMEL robot technology that could soon be seen in battle should be able save soldiers lives at first. The other side to this is that soon robots will be a main theme on the battlefield and the only thing more deadly than humans is machines. They are tools that take what humans hold in their imagination and allow it to become a reality. Once it is developed, it would be naive to think that America will be the only country with this form of weaponry. It is like throwing more gasoline on the fire and expecting it to put out the flame. The problem will compound until it becomes a bigger problem. Soldiers could start losing their lives to a mechanized gun sitting 4 miles away from where they stand. It is a deadly cycle of events that in the end only has more people being killed. That doesn't appear to be a concern for the developer of a technology such as this. As a matter of fact that seems to be the overall goal.