Recently a book came out called “Wired for War” by Pete Singer. I saw Singer on the Daily Show and heard him on NPR and the Commonwealth Club. He’s trying to tell the world about the quiet revolution in warfare that has happened during the Iraq War. These aren’t the self-directed robots of sci-fi, but remote-controlled robots whose pilots are in some computer room thousands of miles from the site of the conflict.

In Las Vegas a few months ago, I turned on the TV and saw on the local station that there was a bomb threat at the Folsom Street Experience. A robot came to scout the area and clear it. I recalled I’d seen bomb-defusing robots before, in a documentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.