Take drones. There are currently six sites, scattered around the country, that the FAA has established as testing areas for unmanned autonomous vehicles. But the agency, Cummings argues, likely won't be able to hire the people they're going to need to run these programs. It's a systemic problem, and one that begins with the education system. "Our country," Cummings says, "simply is not putting out enough" people—engineers, roboticists, software engineers—who have expertise in robotics. The government, in the military and beyond, isn't doing enough to incentivize or compensate technologists. "And the ones that we do train," Cummings adds, "are going to private companies like Google or Apple."

That means, among other things, a government that is ill-equipped when it comes to the work of regulation and oversight. Whether private industry's current hegemony over robotics is a generally good or bad thing is debatable, Cummings allows, "but I think it's certainly a problem when our government cannot assess whether or not technology is decent—or even ready to be deployed."

Which leads to another reason to think that "the United States government is in serious trouble." While the U.S. is lagging in when it comes to robotics' human resources, Cummings says, other countries are quickly catching up. They're developing their own expertise with automated technologies—including, alarmingly, automated weaponry. Drones, for better or for worse, are "are a true democratization of technology," Cummings says; they put significant amounts of power in the hands not just of states, but of individuals and other extra-state actors. And if the U.S. is ill-equipped, systemically, to deal with warfare that is newly democratized and newly weaponized ... "it's my prediction," Cummings says, "that we're about to have our you-know-whats handed to us on a platter."

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