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Robots have been science fiction tropes for decades now, and they often play the villain. As the stories tell us, there’s not much to be done when an unstoppable army of deadly autonomous killing machines decides to wage war on humanity. Now, a new report from Human Rights Watch and Harvard University suggests that it might be a good idea to head the problem off before fantasy becomes reality by banning the creation of semiautonomous war-fighting drones that might one day gain the intelligence to become fully autonomous killer robots.