Robot Wars

EyesWideOpen writes "According to this New York Times article (free reg. req.) the Office of Naval Research is coordinating an effort to determine what it will take to build a system that will make it possible for autonomous vehicles (in the air and on the ground), or A. V.'s, to serve as soldiers on the battlefield. The project, called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman, would consist of a network in which the highest-flying of the A. V.'s 'will communicate with headquarters, transmitting data and receiving commands. The commands will be passed along to a team of lower-flying A.V.'s that will relay them in turn to single drones serving as liaisons for squadrons of A.V.'s.' The article also mentions that the A. V.'s will have the ability to send high resolution color video as well as still photographs using MPEG-4 compression. Pretty interesting stuff."

Comments

Re:It sounds cool?

[neocon]

The problem I have with this argument is that we are not talking about `vigilante' justice at all here -- international law has always recognized the rights of nations to defend themselves, and this is explicitly present in the UN charter.

That we sought, and received, UN Security Council clearance for our actions in Afghanistan is a nicety, but the fact is that we are exercising our national rights, and indeed living up to our national responsibility to protect our citizens.

To argue that this is a violation of `due process' is to misunderstand the essential differences between war and law enforcement. When US troops stormed up the cliffs on D-Day, they did not take aside their German prisoners and read them their miranda rights...