There are so many ways this could go wrong.

Courtesy of Gyre.org :

The South Korean Defense Security Command has announced that they intend to set up 250 armed, robotic guards to defend the 252-kilometer-long DMZ between North and South Korea.

And to think I dismissed C. Douglas Lummis when he brought up that silly film Robocop in his text Radical Democracy. He wasn’t underestimating governments at all.

Sigh. Here’s the Free North Korea post on the same subject, and another from The Security Watchtower. Looks like the newspaper articles they’re referring to are gone into the archives, sadly.

Oh, wait, here’s one.

Well, at 20 billion won, I imagine there’s going to be a lot of what Americans call pork. Not just that, but I’m worried about issues like upkeep, maintenance, and the possibility these things could get hacked. While I think the original Robocop idea of the machine itself going mad is unlikely—it’s not even cybernetic, it’s a pure machine, and not smart enough to go mad—I do think there’s a lot that could go horribly, horribly wrong with these things, and that any machine that fires without human controllers is a problem.

The other thing the investment seems to signal is that nobody’s expecting a major collapse up north, or for that matter reunification, for at least a generation. Such an outlay of funds wouldn’t happen unless they thought the border would be need to held solid for a long time.

Unless, of course, their fear is that an internal collapse will happen soon, in which case they’ll still want the border held solid, and likely by force, and likely at a distance by people who cannot hesitate to shoot as soldiers might when faced with northern refugees.

And I don’t think I’m just being completely dystopian.