Robot.

But here’s the twist: Robots, apparently, desire to be soldiers.

Whereas my cat would no doubt be content to play the robot pur sang—mindlessly spinning and cleaning and freaking out when I pour water on him [it?]—the poor robot whose job he’d so heartlessly steal would be an ethical soldier, one capable of making “the right choice” about when to unleash a devastating hail of armor-piercing minigun rounds onto children, compact cars, noisy televisions, life-size cut-outs of Adnan “Crazy Cheeze” Sabri, &c.

To clarify my position on ethical robotic devastation, I should add that attempts to trick-out the ethics of human soldiers have so far led to nada; as my man Philip Zimbardo points out on TED, the adoption of the uniform of an “ethical” government has—since the slave-Imperium of Roma, since the slave-empires of Sumer and Egypt long before—provided only a smokescreen, a chance to faux-ethically rationalize away our wars.

Perhaps robots can do us one better. Or perhaps we might pass the job of soldiering on to the noble (and highly irrational) cat. While certainly unethical, any given cat-soldier would also be pissy and libertarian, unable and unwilling to coordinate with the next—thus preventing the formation of a feline SkyNet or Matrix. Wars would be shorter and center around the control and distribution of fish-guts and whole milk. And—when the cats (individually) took command of the Roomba factories—the hardwood floors of the world would look a lot shinier, a lot faster.

(Paritur pax catto?)