Intelligent weapons are coming [Engineering Cyber Agents]

"When a bomb starts talking about itself in the third person, I get worried." When the crew of USS Voyager (a vessel, by the way, which herself sported bio-neural circuitry...) had their encounter with Dreadnought, a sentient weapon of mass destruction bent on fulfilling its mission, the idea of Autonomous Intelligent Agents (AIAs) in military use was still quite disturbing. One could think that by the late 24th century Lt. Tom Paris should have been used to it though, for 300 years earlier, in the early 21st century, the world was already very close to the actual development and deployment of genuine AIAs. Now is the perfect time to have a look at what real-life AIAs might be like.