A future once imagined by science fiction and Hollywood has arrived on the battlefields of Ukraine, with autonomous machines taking on ever more dangerous combat roles. When Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot” to the world in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), he imagined artificial workers who would eventually turn against their human creators. More than a century later, his unsettling vision is finding echoes not in factories, but on the battlefields of U