Lauren Davis reports that a new company has been launched with the express purpose of fighting robots.

It happens to the best of us: Your robot body guard takes a car bomb to the brain and suddenly she thinks she’s supposed to kill you rather than protect you. Or maybe an enemy combatant has sent an autonomous computerized agent to destroy you, and Sarah Connor is nowhere to be found. How can you defend yourself against a mechanized foe? Until artificial intelligence starts obeying Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, one company is developing tools to combat the eventual robot revolution.

Dotcom millionaire Ben Way launched Weapons Against Robots (WAR) Defence to combat the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence through the creation of anti-robot weaponry, detection and monitoring of robots, and use of anti-robot viruses. Way believes that, as AI is increasingly used in warfare and defense, it is prudent to ready countermeasures in the event, not only of an enemy’s use of robotics, but that an intelligence’s programming goes awry.

Read the whole thing. Personally, I think this is quite sensible, despite the rather risible stories that will no doubt accompany this company’s launch. I have a lot of severe doubts that any kind of human level-AI is possible at all in the near future (and by “near” I mean the next 2,000 years), so I’m not thinking that these defenses will be used in our war on Skynet, but rather that they’ll be used against the semi-autonomous robots which are already being deployed in the battlefield.