It was a routine drive along a quiet road on the outskirts of the Iranian capital, Tehran.

As usual, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was traveling in convoy with his team of bodyguards.

Why so many bodyguards?

He was believed to be the most senior scientist behind a covert nuclear weapons program.

What happened next is the subject of confusion and multiple conflicting accounts.

No one disputes that Fakhrizadeh died that day, that he was shot at multiple times.

But according to one account from senior Iranian officials, at the time of the ambush, no

attackers were present.

The shots came from a machine gun hidden in a car, but no one was there to pull the trigger.

The gun was automated, remote controlled, it was claimed.

Another Iranian official said that the gun used artificial intelligence.

Now this story is murky, but it touched a nerve.

The story of the computerized machine gun that fired on its own sounded a lot like that

frightening staple of dystopian movies, the killer robot.

Something that can think, aim, and even take a shot all by itself.

I'm Suzanne Kiyampur, and on the inquiry this week, we're asking, are killer robots

the future of warfare?

What we're really talking about are systems that have the ability to select and engage targets

without the intervention of a human operator, or without the direction of a human operator.

Heather Roth is a senior research analyst at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in

the United States.

He's advised the US Defense Department and given testimony to the UN.

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