Robots. Artificial intelligence. Droids. Drones.

They should all be feared.

If you think otherwise, you’d be calling some of the smartest people on the planet, like Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Elon Musk … idiots. And, they’re not.

Here’s what the world famous theoretical physicist said about firms like Boston Dynamics (owned by, ahem, Google by the way) and others that are developing robots for the battlefield and beyond, via the Observer:

“Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history,” wrote Stephen Hawking in an op-ed, which appeared in The Independent in 2014. “Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets.” Professor Hawking added in a 2014 interview with BBC, “humans, limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded by A.I.”

Case in point? Here’s the aforementioned Massachusetts-based contractor being somewhat sinister in dropping their rare metal processors, nuts, bolts and hubris (their creation known as BigDog) all over what was is to most a warm tradition/memory: Santa Claus’s sleigh being pulled by real, flesh and blood reindeer.

“Happy Holidays”? Happy? Holidays??

Oh, but it gets worse.

Here’s the non-tongue-in-cheek “Atlas” (among other strange military bots), a six-foot-tall humanoid robot that weighs 320 pounds and runs through the woods like a goddamn metallic grim reaper:

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