One reason why we are supposed to need 15-25,000 New Citizens a year is because their sons have to do NS. Apparently, S’pore is running out of S’porean-born males that can be forced to provide cheap labour for things like National Day Parade, F1, the Kiddie Games etc. Or to defend S’pore on the cheap
Err what about robots for the latter task?
[T]he scientific literature has raised the possibility of armed robots, programmed to behave like locusts or other insects that will swarm together in clouds as enemy targets appear on the battlefield. Each member of the robotic swarm could carry a small warhead or use its kinetic energy to attack a target.
Peter W Singer, an expert in the future of warfare at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, says that the arrival on the battlefield of the robot warrior raises profound questions.
“Every so often in history, you get a technology that comes along that’s a game changer,” he says. “They’re things like gunpowder, they’re things like the machine gun, the atomic bomb, the computer… and robotics is one of those.”
“When we say it can be a game changer”, he says, “it means that it affects everything from the tactics that people use on the ground, to the doctrine, how we organise our forces, to bigger questions of politics, law, ethics, when and where we go to war.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21576376
Related post: http://atans1.wordpress.com/2013/03/12/alternative-to-fts/
