Slashdot Mirror
Military Robots Get Machine Guns
javaxman writes "Next spring, the U.S. military is expecting to deploy Talon robots with machine guns. They can also be equiped with rocket launchers. Really, they're remote-controlled 'bots, not true autonomous 'bots, so you can save the Skynet jokes for, um, some day in the not-to-distant future. This is just the first, or maybe second step. As for me, I just want to see arena matches between gangs of these suckers. Robot wars indeed!"
Whatever happened to Asimov's rules of robots that they can do no harm to humans? For years, bearded terminal hackers have done their thing, hacking on software, hardware, and such, with little regard to the ethics of the situation. But now, with our creations affecting mankind in a more profound way, we give little more thought to ethics than we did with a simple BASIC shell script.
Think about this the next time you are coding a servo controller on your Redhat compiler. Could your code be misused in a way you would not approve?
The Patriot Missile system fires with no human intervention. It uses an Identification Friend-or-Foe system to track everything in the air, and shoot down anything that shouldn't be there. During the recent Iraq invasion, a glitch in this system caused it to fire upon a British fighter jet, destroying it and killing its pilot. It was about to do the same to a US jet, but that jet was armed with fast-flying radar-seeking missiles designed to take out hostile SAM sites, and was able to take out the radar component of the Patriot system before the missile reached his plane. Notably no one was injured on the ground when he did this, since there was nobody actually sitting in front of the device, or anywhere near it.
I think it'll be a long time before autonomously firing ground systems are in place, because it's hard enough doing IFF in the sky, let alone on the ground. I think the fire-finder system (used in the Balkans to take out mortar positions in the mountains firing upon cities) might do this in some limited capacity, but that's only anti-artillery, rather than telling the difference between a guerilla carrying an RPG and a farmer carrying a section of irrigation pipe. Sure, you could wait until they shoot first for all of these systems, since that's a lot easier to determine automatically, but I think it's quite obvious that waiting for the other guy to shoot first is very far from the policy of the current administration.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I think you are missing the point that only fewer soldiers on OUR SIDE die. The casulaties on the other will make up for the discrepancy.
Comon, all of us here at Slashdot should know this. Rule #1 of hacking: He who has access to the physical device, controls the device. It would be all too easy to crack the case of one of these things and change the crystal so that instead of running off of who-knows-what frequency it's now controlled with a 72MHz RC controller! Personally, I don't want these things going into battle for us. We're gonna spend billions on these things and some kid somewhere is gonna come up with an 80 cent way to turn it against us. (Think along the lines of "drawing a circle around the circumference with a pernament marker".)
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.
True, although it's amazing what data you can gather from something unintelligable. A friend of mine who used to work as a translator for US army intelligence intercepts mentioned how at one point, the Soviets had figured out a system to tell what commands our troops were issuing during war games. They weren't able to decrypt our messages, mind you. They simply figured out that different messages had different lengths, and tended to be broadcast at different times, different orders, etc - and matched them up with the meanings (we fixed this when we found out, of course)
;) Sure, your range wouldn't be great, but in urban combat, who knows - it could possibly prove effective.
Now, tricks like this (probably not these exact tricks) likely wouldn't let you send commands to the bot; however, they might let you know what is being sent to the bot, and what it is sending back.
Personally, I'm kinda curious as to how effective tempest attacks would be against "secure" communication devices, especially radios. I mean, radios make sounds by using pulsed magnetic fields to vibrate a diaphragm - sounds like a good way to broadcast unwanted RF to me
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."