An idea I first heard from Tom Digby at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society about 1980. Why not?

The US government can't order the Fed to just 'hand it over'. That money is loaned to the US at interest. The amount owed to the Fed (principle + interest) is more than the amount of money available, and can never be paid back except by extracting it from somewhere else outside of the US's economy.

I would imagine that s group of some later version of the bird could fly cover for a single (remote or actual) piloted aircraft. That strategy would insinuate human judgement into the mission, while freeing the robots to do what they need to within those restrictions. Of course, hijacking the flight of robots would then require only gaining control over the piloted craft and changing the mission definition. When do we start seeing these things in movies?

This has potential. They'll start teaching each other things, and pretty soon those robots will be sporting what some people might refer to as 'artificial' intelligence. Of course they might get a bit touchy [ http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2008/02/02/short-story-the-a-word/ ] about us calling them that, though. And at some point, the lies we tell them will come back [ http://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/short-story-edifice-of-lies/ ] to bite us. But hey, these are just stories. Fiction. Well, at least they were when I wrote them. Now I'm not so sure.

>>>> Nature didn't select for "non-competitiveness"

Actually, it does. Nature selects for survival, and that can be achieved by finding ways to avoid competing for the same resources. For example, staking out a different plot of ground, or an unoccupied tree, or eating your second-favorite food because you don't have to fight over it.

Not Tesla, Farnsworth. According to the time traveler from Westercon 100 that I met at the Seattle Westercon 50 Science Fiction Convention in 1997, Philo T. Farnsworth not only invented TV, but in 1927 he invented the time machine. If you don't believe me, ask Dr. Robert Forward; his grandson from the future was on some of the panels.

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Read my short stories at klurgsheld.wordpress.com

This sort of thing can be spun either way, so any attempt to investigate it further could be hazardous to the researchers and publishers. In fact, I explored the potential side-effects of doing so in one of the political short stories at my blog, called 'Forced Inquiry'. Pop the following into your browser and have look.

klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/short-story-forced-inquiry/