Umm, robots need to be certified and regulated to hard coded robotic laws or something. Before criminals give them guns, or strap explosives to them, or remote takeover and untracibly murder people in their homes then burn the house down.
Original GTA had an RC model car you could drive under your target and detonate remotely - that was in 1997, and they didn't invent this trope. US Navy trained dolphins to deploy ordnance in the 1960s; before that, together with the Air Force they played with strapping incendiaries to bats, packing them into a bomb casing and dropping from the air, with hopes of creating what we'd today call a "Slaughterbots" scenario except EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE.
And I doubt these were very original ideas, either - I bet you could trace them back to other such R&D across history, all the way to Ancient China, which figured out gunpowder much earlier than Europe, and like with any general enough scientific discovery, had a field day trying to apply it to everything they could think of. They didn't stop at fireworks, they built land mines and unguided missiles too, even multistage rocket and IIRC (read that in some book long ago, can't find independent source now) rockets that could drop payload and fly back home to be recovered. (And yes, apparently someone was crazy enough to try for manned rocket flight, too.)
Anyway, I digress.
I guess, the larger point I'm making is this: in terms of their relationship with individuals and societies, robots are nothing new. Robots and automation are answers to needs that even first human societies had, and they have not changed. History is full of attempts at fulfilling those needs, many quite successful: domesticating and training animals, forced labor for prisoners, slavery. All these impacted socities, informed laws and fueled imaginations of poets and writers.
Which is to say, humanity has been dealing with robots and AIs for a long time now, we have way more accumulated experience with them at social and economic level than people realize - people just called them by a host of different names. "Slaves" and "servants", "genies" and "demons" and "fairies", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_ground_vehicle#Histor...
That's 1915, if we're going for remote control bombs.
EDIT:
Even earlier still - apparently, a radio-controlled torpedo was patented in 1897!
"Drones" aren't really a new thing apart from how cheap they are. We've had television guided missiles (the level of autonomy most modern "drones" in Ukraine have) since WWII. Arguably we've had non-TV guided missile prototypes since WWI (Kettering Aerial Torpedo). We've had autonomously guided missiles (radar homing) since the early 50s, and optically guided ones since the early 70s.
The capability keeps expanding of course, but it's been pretty incremental.
We thought this might happen with DJI drones, but let’s be honest it’s way easier to do real damage with a humanoid robot that has a kitchen knife taped to its arms (especially to a sleeping victim) than it is to source explosives for a DJI drone.
Maybe theoretically possible… but I’m more scared of robots personally.
By the same logic, autonomous cars are an even better murder weapon than robots because they are very heavy and can drive through walls. Mow down tens or hundreds of people at once.
> “people aren't scared of cars”
Under “normalisation of deviance”, NotJustBikes YouTube talked about how he sees almost no Netherlands news pieces about cars crashing into buildings, because cars basically never crash into buildings in the Netherlands. When they do, the Dutch treat it as a road design issue and update the road and regulations to stop it in future. Whereas in Canada he had four cars crash into the buildings around his child’s school in a short time, and there are almost no mainstream news stories about cars crashing into buildings in Canada because it’s so common it’s fallen below newsworthiness into just local newspaper small comment. USA/Canada blame the driver and fix nothing, so it keeps happening, so people are used to it.
Although cyclists are scared of cars. And drivers are which is why there’s the SUV arms race to be in the bigger car to be more protected against other cars.
You can buy a kitchen oven with pyrolysis functionality connected to the internet right now. I'm not sure if running that for an extended time can burn down your house or just destroy the oven, but I'm sure some attacker is going to take the time to find out one of these days.