Land mines exist for a reason, as weapons, they have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you can set them up and get automatic area denial: if

Land mines exist for a reason, as weapons, they have advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you can set them up and get automatic area denial: if your enemy (or your friends, or civilians, or large dogs, or cattle) enter the minefield, they're going to die or at least be mutilated. Obviously, some of that is disadvantage. The biggest disadvantage is that they're cheap, and buried in the ground, so it's tempting to leave them there, especially if you happen to lose the conflict. So they continue to kill people long after there are no enemies left. Automated gunbots have the same advantage as landmines. They share a shade of the minor disadvantage, namely they can't reliably tell enemies from friendlies or civilians. But neither can a grunt in a machine gun emplacement. They are expensive, and above the ground, so there's no world in which civilian children, years after the conflict, are shot to death while playing in a field. So if these are the "next landmine" I say: good. We would all love to live in the world in which there is no war, but, we don't. Until we do, we will need the weapons of war.