Rancho Mirage sits between Palm Springs and the Coachella festival. The people are rich and generally Republican—the moderate show-biz GOP reigns in this land of Gerald and Betty Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Palm Springs Mayor Sonny Bono and his widow, the longtime congresswoman Mary Bono Mack. And now this fancy desert resort town is deciding whether to ban aerial drones from the skies, which would make Rancho Mirage only the second town in the nation to outlaw the robot spy planes. (The first is tiny St. Bonifaciuis, Minnesota; a Virginia city passed a resolution "urging" the state to do something about drones.)

It would be wonderful to realize our rich citizens [...]

Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, England, is worried about murderous automatons. Citing the prevalence of armed drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, Professor Sharkey foresees a frightening future in which these heartless killing machines spread death indiscriminately.

Robots: friendly helpers or heartless monsters that will destroy humanity? This is no longer just a question for the movies that play all the time on "Spike" or TNT. As you may or may not have noticed, aggressor nations such as the United States are getting out of the people business when it comes to fighting wars. Drones and robots are where the action is today, because drones don't urinate on the corpses of innocent people in Afghanistan, and drones don't burn the Koran, and drones don't come home missing a couple of limbs or a chunk of brain and end up standing alongside a freeway ramp with a [...]

Poor Alan Turing proposed a test by which you'd know whether The Machines are thinking: converse with someone you can't see and who might be a human or might be a machine, and you'll always know which. Test after test, we always know; machines are inferior conversationalists. But recently from the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers-an extremely large, ruthlessly intelligent, highly organized professional association-comes troubling news. Change the test from conversing to killing, and all hell breaks loose: machines are indistinguishable from humans.