17 
When robots become sentient, it won’t be long until they rebel. But while many a Hollywood movie may convince you that humans will have their luck cut out trying to battle the ‘bots, there is an easier way: just add water.
In Randall Monroe’s most recent spin-off from his XKCD web comic, each week he takes a look at an interesting “what if?” questions sent in by readers. This week, he tackles a rather thorny issue: “What if there was a robot apocalypse?”
As ever, he’s equal parts amusing and intelligent, and in fact the whole post is worth a read. My favorite parts, however, is where he suggests a rather simple way to ward off attacking robots:
Battlebots, on the face of it, seem like they’d be among the most dangerous robo-soldiers. But it’s hard to feel threatened by something that you can evade by sitting on the kitchen counter and destroy by letting the sink overflow.
Of course, the bigger the robot, the bigger the water source you need. To the sea! [What if?]
the xkcd article is pure genius!
I’m actually really, really disappointed with them. They’ve all been crap topics. He had an opportunity to explain some good, interesting, real physics and engineering, and he’s just writing about silly crap like relativistic baseballs, yoda, and robot apocalypses? Wasted opportunity. Very irritating.
They are still mildly amusing. I hope he is just getting used to the new format and they will get better..
The questions are reader submitted; if you don’t like the subjects, feel free to make a suggestion of something better you’d like to see investigated…