A staff writer for The New Yorker, Jane Mayer joins Fresh Air host Terry Gross to talk about what she discovered while researching her upcoming article "The Predator War." The story explores the ethics and controversies surrounding the CIA's covert drone program, in which remote-controlled airplanes target and kill terror suspects within Pakistan — a country that's a U.S. ally, not an adversary.
Robot soldiers are no longer just the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. As technological warfare expert P.W. Singer explains in his new book, Wired For War, some military tasks previously assigned to humans are now being handled by machines.