How about swarms of these designed to fan out and seek out any humanoid mammal in the area and deliver a taser/ tranquilizer charge? The batteries will run out in a few minutes, but not before everyone in the area has been incapacitated or telemetry data has revealed the location of all people encountered by the swarm. This could be the basis of a new counter-terrorist weapon.
I didn't realize we had so much terrorism that we need to program swarms of these to do what you described. Or by terrorism do you mean legitimate activist groups that threaten existing power structures?
Using gas in a situation like this isn't like in the movies. Dosages vary tremendously with physiology and interactions with other drugs, so dosing everyone is very likely to produce fatalities. Swarms of TASER-bots would avoid this.
> Or by terrorism do you mean legitimate activist groups that threaten existing power structures?
That's largely a matter of point of view. Is your point of view that anyone who even thinks of the weapons implications of technology automatically is for the oppression of dissent? If so, then this reveals your prejudices. For myself, I think that these sorts of gedankenexperiments about potential military use are interesting and valuable, because they allow for concerned parties to become aware of these possibilities, which is constructive. The automatic tarring of people doing such speculation has the opposite effect.
