Okay, so we have been going about this the wrong way. I just read this article. Sorry. I have worked in the very narrow field of discovering human cues to depth and developing mathematical models of how that worked. Nothing crazy like kickstarting SkyNet or anything was on our minds at the time. Most of the grant money in the field came from the DOD, and we assumed that was all cool. Sorry, dude who had his sister's wedding bombed by drones that killed most of your family. :( Sorry guy that felt he was fighting for his country's survival and got bombed out of oblivion. Sorry little screaming limbless children. Honestly, I worry about killing spiders. I don't know how to deal with this.
Anyway, some people really, really like to write code, and we have this crazy desire to make computational models of human vision so that we can understand how it works. Seriously, vision takes up an amazing part of our brain and sorting it all out is crazy. The possibilities are great: Helping blind people, cars that can navigate by themselves, systems that can recognize who you are and protect your things. It sounds great. Unfortunately, the field seems driven by people who want drones and piss-poor facial recognition systems to make decisions better left to human knowledge and common sense. Sorry. I really don't know how to express my deepest regret that this is the direction that this field has to bend to: the whims of paranoid politicians looking to justify their racism. Sorry.
Anyway, I just wanted to get that out.(Edited 2 minutes later.)