Ender's Game is here.

Read this story at Slate and/or listen to the story at NPR. No exaggeration here: the kicker premise of Orson Scott Card's classic science fiction novel Ender's Game is now completely possible.

In a nutshell, Raytheon hired video game developers to redesign the command and control systems for military drone aircraft. The result is a video game-like system that on the one hand, further isolates the operator from the very real death and destruction on the other side of the world, and on the other hand, makes the system intuitively easy to use, particularly for a generation of young people raised on incredibly realistic video games. It's impressive, and terrifying. The reporter's 7-year-old son watched the demo with him, and said, "It was really cool."