By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

In 1984, Skynet, the supercomputer that rules a future Earth, sent a cyborg assassin, a "terminator," back to our time. His job was to liquidate the woman who would give birth to John Connor, the leader of the underground human resistance of Skynet's time. That, of course, was the plot of the first Terminator movie, and for the millions who saw it, the images of future machine war—of hunter-killer drones flying above a wasted landscape—are unforgettable.

Since then, there have been two sequels and the fourth film in the series will hit our multiplexes this May.

Oh, sorry, I don't mean hit. I mean, arrive in.

Meanwhile, hunter-killer drones haven't waited for Hollywood. Actual unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), pilotless surveillance and assassination drones armed with Hellfire missiles, are already patrolling our expanding global battlefields, hunting down human beings. And in the Pentagon and the labs of defense contractors, UAV supporters are already talking about and working on next-generation machines. Post-2020, according to these dreamers, drones will be able to fly and fight, discern enemies and incinerate them without human decision-making. They're even wondering about just how to program human ethics into them.

Today, the most advanced UAV, the Reaper, housing up to four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs, packs the sort of punch once reserved for a jet fighter. Dispatched to the skies over the farthest reaches of the American empire, powered by a 1,000-horsepower turbo prop engine at its rear, the Reaper can fly at up to 21,000 feet for up to 22 hours (until fuel runs short), streaming back live footage from three cameras (or sending it to troops on the ground)—16,000 hours of video a month.

No need to worry about a pilot dozing off during those 22 hours. The human crews "piloting" the drones, often from thousands of miles away, just change shifts when tired. So the planes are left to endlessly cruise Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani skies relentlessly seeking out, like so many terminators, specific enemies whose identities can, under certain circumstances—or so the claims go—be determined even through the walls of houses. When a "target" is found and agreed upon—in Pakistan, the permission of Pakistani officials to fire is no longer considered necessary—and a missile or bomb is unleashed, the cameras are so powerful that "pilots" can watch the facial expressions of those being liquidated on their computer monitors "as the bomb hits."

Approximately 5,500 UAVs, mostly unarmed, now operate over Iraq and the Af-Pak (Afghanistan-Pakistan) theater of operations. Part of the more-than-century-long development of war in the air, drones have become favorites of American military planners.

Our drone wars represent a new chapter in the history of assassination. Once upon a time, to be an assassin for a government was a furtive, shameful thing. In those days, an assassin, if successful, took down a single person, not the targeted individual and anyone in the vicinity (if targeting intelligence proves wrong).

Today, we increasingly display our assassination wares with pride. To us, at least, it seems perfectly normal for assassination aerial operations to be a part of an open discussion in Washington and in the media. Consider this a new definition of "progress" in our world.

Don't for a minute imagine that those hunter-killer skies won't someday fill with the drones of other nations. In "drone world," the Chinese, the Russians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis, the Georgians, and the Iranians, among others, already have drones. In the Lebanon War of 2006, Hezbollah flew drones over Israel. In fact, if you have the skills, you can create your own drone. Undoubtedly, the future holds unnerving possibilities for small groups intent on assassination from the air.

Of course, when you openly control squads of assassination drones patrolling airspace over other countries, you've made a mockery of whatever national sovereignty might once have meant. It's a precedent that may someday make us distinctly uncomfortable.

At the moment, our drone wars are being fought with the airborne equivalent of cars with cranks, but the "race" to the horizon is already underway. By next year, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with 12 cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half-mile radius from 12 different angles—and that program doesn't compare to the future 92-camera Argus program. Drone armaments will also undoubtedly grow progressively more powerful and "precise." In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four years into development that should someday be "completely autonomous"; that is, it theoretically will do without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype are scheduled for 2010.

By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy reported recently, "The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. Onboard computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons."

The skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock assassins. Of course, when we check ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere, however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and loose our missiles from thousands of miles away, we undoubtedly look like something other than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators. To them, we are now the terminators of the planet, implacable machine assassins.

The fact that without the help of a single advanced cyborg we are already in the process of creating a Terminator planet should give us pause for thought.

Editor:The terminators see rebels, terrorists, or guerrillas planning bloodthirsty attacks, who deserve what they get. Those being terminated—which includes many innocent civilians, men, women and children—see the terminators acting as judge, jury, and executioners, working from hundreds or thousands of miles away, just on the flimsy basis of some grainy video footage. They see it as long-distance murder, and often it's mass murder, with dozens of lives snuffed out in an instant. The U.S. used to rail against the sort of assassinations the Soviets carried out, and now they've gone far beyond "the Evil Empire" they once condemned!