Because humanity doesn’t have enough things to worry about already, a cybersecurity expert has issued a warning that sex robots may kill people in the near future.

Nick Patterson, from Deakin University in Australia, is behind the killer sex robot warning, telling The Daily Star that the robots could be hacked by those with nefarious intent, or more specifically, murderous intent.

“Hackers can hack into a robot or a robotic device and have full control of the connections, arms, legs and other attached tools like in some cases knives or welding devices,” Patterson is quoted as saying. “Often these robots can be upwards of 200 pounds, and very strong. Once a robot is hacked, the hacker has full control and can issue instructions to the robot. The last thing you want is for a hacker to have control over one of these robots. Once hacked they could absolutely be used to perform physical actions for an advantageous scenario or to cause damage.”

While tales of killer sex robots might make Patterson sound insane, he’s not alone when it comes to scaremongering over robots, with Tesla Inc. chief executive officer and founder Elon Musk also being fond of spinning nightmares about killer robots. In August, Musk led a letter supported by 100 robotics and artificial intelligence experts that called upon the United Nations to ban killer robots.

Musk and friends argue that “lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare” that “will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend.”

He may not have considered killer sex robots in the letter, but in theory, it’s along the same lines.

The push against killer robots has not been heeded by governments, with U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work saying in an interview last week that the age of human-machine collaboration in battle is near, complete with “aggressive use” of big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Work, also, may not have considered sex robots as a viable weapon in the U.S. military arsenal, but if you can take Patterson’s warning seriously, there’s probably someone at an alphabet agency such as the Central Intelligence Agency that has.

Photo: calistan/Flickr