Robot Wars is dead again. After three series, the BBC has announced that the revival is over and the show will not be returning. Fans are outraged – there are petitions and tweets and howls of anguish, all railing against the decision – but in all honesty, you can see why it happened.

When Robot Wars first aired in 1998, it felt like a blast from the future. You wouldn’t know that to look at it today – the first series, presented by a still-posh Jeremy Clarkson wearing the world’s most dismal leather jacket, has aged roughly as well as an egg sandwich in an airing cupboard – but back then the term “robot” still had a slightly abstract edge to it. In 1998, robots were the things from films that travelled back in time to kill everyone.

But that was 20 years ago. Real robots are everywhere now, and they’re absolutely terrifying. Just look at any Boston Dynamics video on YouTube, full of indestructible weaponised headless dogs that chase and chase and chase until everyone is dead. A full 80% of my nightmares are about these robots now. I’m convinced that, when I die, the last thing I’ll see is one of those things hurtling towards me at 90mph, covered in knives. Robots defuse bombs. Robots appear from the skies and bomb towns. In the real world, all wars are now robot wars to some extent.

And yet Robot Wars had its hands jammed over its ears, pretending that none of this had happened. In the land of Robot Wars, it was forever 1998. As far as the show was concerned, the pinnacle of technology was essentially still a remote-controlled car with a hammer on it, operated by schoolboys. You simply cannot make a programme with the word Robot in the title in 2018 and be this backwards-looking.

One of the big complaints about the end of Robot Wars seems to be that it got kids interested in robotics. The sight of these primitive vehicles trundling around and banging into things was an educational tool, inspiring youngsters to make robots of their own. Without Robot Wars, the argument goes, we’re depriving ourselves of a future of robotic excellence.

But that doesn’t make for a particularly entertaining show. Not when we all have a visceral expectation of what robots are capable of. I think there’s a place for a programme called Robot Wars on television, but it needs to be radically different to the one that just died.

First, ditch the operators. If Robot Wars is going to be even slightly relevant in 2018, it needs to pour all its focus into AI. We live in a world of lethal autonomous weapons now, of bleeding-edge robots that have been expressly designed to learn how to destroy as much as possible as efficiently as possible. Compared with this, the sight of a teenager waggling an Xbox controller in order to make a clumsy hunk of metal spin around seems hilariously outdated.

Then ditch the arena. Nobody wants to see robots clattering against each other inside a tiny perspex cube any more – if they did, the BBC wouldn’t have axed Robot Wars – so let’s take over a city. An abandoned one, such as Chernobyl or Fukushima or Detroit. Let’s rig these towns with cameras, then set all manner of autonomous killer robots against each other. There would be no rounds or challenges to speak of, just loads of footage of the scariest possible robotic creations learning how to destroy each other as brutally as possible. Drone strikes could take out entire blocks. Robot dogs could crawl from the wreckage and blast the drones out of the sky. It would be an orgy of the most harrowing violence imaginable. Plainly put, it would be an actual robot war.

And sure, the repercussions of a series like this would be horrible. The logical endpoint would be the robots figuring out how to operate without their creators, and teaming up to enslave mankind. We would be forever cowering under an unblinking robotic overlord and our lives would be miserable and short. But, hey, better that than another series of Robot Wars as it is.

