Chris Cole, a campaigner who runs the Drone Wars UK website, said: "It's a fictional scenario... which we are some distance away from, but it's becoming easier to imagine because of the push towards speed.
"Military decision makers are saying we are too slow to react and we need to start handing over more decision making to machines.
"We should not go down this route, just like chemical weapons and biological weapons are regarded as being beyond the pale, we should be saying this about automated systems."
Of course for fans of the Terminator series, the real point of contention is the date Skynet will implement its attack against humanity.
In the original Terminator film Kyle Reese, played by Michael Biehn, is sent back in time from a post-apocalyptic future and tells how Skynet was installed on 4 August 1997 and gained its deadly self-awareness on 29 August.
This future was, however, altered in the second Terminator film, where the heroes succeed in destroying the research that led to the creation of Skynet.
But, as is conveniently revealed in the subsequent sequels, the apocalyptic future was not prevented but merely postponed.
The film's director, James Cameron, told the TMZ website:, external "Kyle Reese said in the first film that it was only one possible future - clearly, not the one we're in.
"Maybe Kyle, Sarah, John and the T-800 changed things enough to steer us away from that possible future."
He added: "Now instead of nuclear war we need to worry about global climate change.
"And the machines taking over? With everybody going through their lives bent over their Blackberrys all day long, you could even argue the machines have already won."
Mr Cameron's cinematic vision has, thankfully, not been borne out, but could there be a final twist in his tale?
To this day the UK's family of military satellites is still called Skynet - a name first coined in 1969 when the first one was built in the US.
A spokesman for Astrium, the company which builds them, said the name preceded the film and was probably a coincidence.
But he added it was just possible the director could have read something about the UK satellite system and adopted the name.