From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroa, and this is the Daily.

Outmanned and outgunned in what has become a war of attrition against Russia,

Ukraine has looked for any way to overcome its vulnerabilities on the battlefield.

That search has led to the emergence of killer robots. Today my

colleague Paul Moser on how Ukraine has become a Silicon Valley for

autonomous weapons,

and how artificial intelligence is reshaping modern warfare. It's Tuesday, July 9th.

Paul, when we've talked on a show about the applications of advanced

artificial intelligence, one of the scarier ideas has been that militaries around the world could use it to make autonomous

killing machines i.e. killer robots. Your reporting shows that this may already

be happening.

Tell me about it.

Yeah, so, you know, when I first got started on my reporting,

you know, I thought this was the stuff of sci-fi.

Like you think about AI hunting and killing somebody and you think of Terminator and you know

Arnold Schwarzenegger hunting people as a robot or you think of HAL in 2001 the Space Odyssey and all-knowing robot that can kill people on a

spaceship. But the thing is the early versions of this technology that will get

us there are already being developed and they're being developed in Ukraine.

And in some ways Ukraine has become a nexus for the development of this type of autonomous

military technology writ large.

They're taking basically artificial intelligence and finding all kinds of

new military applications for it.

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