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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!"
Post this again when they graduate to frickin lasers.
Can these robots be captured and reconfigured to turn against its ex-master, or do they have self-destruction function?
This reminds me of an old Canon printer advertisement, where the Martians use this bubblejet printer to print realistic Mars landscape photos and place them in front of the Mars probe's visual sensor.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Didn't they get shotguns about a month ago? From what I can tell they'll have rocket launchers by the begining of next year.
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?
Johnny Five ... ALIVE!
Need I say more?
Military people were complaining gamers make crap soldiers... now we'll own them at robot wars and laugh at how they mocked us for playing space invaders!
I like muppets.
Did anyone else notice the page file was lemming.htm?
The weapons these things are carrying are the M249 SAW. They are chambered in the 5.56mm NATO round spec and carry a 200 round box which it feeds from, but it can also use the regular 30 round magazines that the M-16 uses. The gun was developed in the 70s and has been used by the US, UK, and Isreali forces. Although the original ones could accept the M-16 magazines the latest Mk.46 mod.0 version doesn't include this option as to save weight on an already hefty 6.8 kg gun.
Creative Demolition
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.
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?
Y'know, I hear this kind of question a lot. I work for a defense contractor. When I'm explaining my work to people, invariably the question of "don't you worry that your work will be used in some future war that you don't approve of?" No, actually, I don't and the reason isn't that I approve of all (or even most) of the military actions that my country is involved in. Part of it is a bit of short-sightedness on my part. I work on very "research-y" topics: data fusion, sensor resource management, and other stuff that isn't gonna get implemented until 2015 at the very earliest. Part of it is that I think war is a necessary part of humanity. I wish it weren't but a simple examination of the human brain reveals that the "R-complex" (aka reptilian brain) is present in every person. I have learned to use my other brain portions to control my aggresive tendancies but there are lots of people who will never master that trick.
But I think the main reason why I don't lie awake at night worrying that the results of my efforts might make the world a worse place is the same reason why parents don't usually lie awake worrying that their kids are going to turn out to cause more harm to society than benefit. I don't have kids but I'm thinking that if I did, I probably wouldn't spend too much time worrying that my kid is gonna become the next Kenneth Lay and be the cause of a great deal of suffering. I would probably think that my kid is more likely to be a benefit to society or I'd just be enjoying the process of raising my kid and not get all worried about how he's going to turn out.
I don't see any reason why one should assume that the products of their efforts will only be used for applications that they 100% agree with. Really, I think that's terribly naive. Do sheetmetal workers lie awake at night worrying that the steel they cast that day might be used in the casing for a bomb?
GMD
watch this
As that old Negro spiritual goes, "[Tibet,]free at last! [Buddha] all mighty! Free at last!"
I would say you're smoking something, but any plant strong enough to make you come up with that would have poisoned itself first and not grown.
"....we can wheel these robots in and take out those suckers without risking harm to our soldiers."
And thus negating the most important check and balance against perpetual war.
It is necessary for soldiers to die in a war, because their death reminds us that war has a price. If you can operate a completely robotic army/navy/air force, you lose that human connection, and create a killing force that can operate without any moral conscience whatsoever.
That makes for a generation of politicians who will decide that because there is no human cost to their side, they may as well just send in the robots and exterminate the opposition.
You are already seeing this process in action with such edicts as not being allowed to show coffins returning from Iraq. If you don't see the cost of war you are more likely to support it, and robot killing machines are the ultimate expression of that lack of human cost to war.
Continuing down that path will have only one outcome, and it won't be pretty.
Visceral Psyche Films
Perhaps the reason that the USA appears to value human life, at least in terms of its own war casualties, is because the USA has so few of them whereas the Chinese have so many?
,IIRC.
Some time in 2000 I spidered the CIA world factbook.
There is an entry in that book labelled;
"Military manpower - fit for military service"
In the edition which I have, it lists the USA as having 2,056,762 people who are fit for military service. I believe that was supposed to include women.
Thats less than one percent of the population.
Every other listed country can manage at least 10%
After the Sept.11 attacks these figures were no longer listed. Instead today it says "NA"
The USA is the *only* country listed as "NA".
Why does the USA *need* machines like this?
Do the math.
I know the parent post was mostly humerous but frankly the idea of a USA with autonomous fighting machines scares the bejebits out of me since lack of manpower seems to be the *only* thing holding them back from a classic Civ endgame.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Would attacking other countries such as Iran be an easier choice to make without the threat of American casualties to sway the public?
Man, I hope so. Otherwise, what good is it? Seriously.
Nobody wants to see more people die in war, but even fewer want to see a lone superpower with even less hesitancy to enforce its agenda around the world.
We all got agendas, Bunky. I have one. America and Iran have one. You clearly have one. And although I don't have the poll numbers in front of me, I believe the number of people who want to see the agenda of a country sitting atop a substantive percentage of the world's oil supply, draped in medieval-level religious fanaticism, and armed with newly-minted atomic weapons achieve ascendancy over that of a nation whose principal exports are fast food, Hollywood movies, Internet cafes, arrogance, swagger, and democracy is rather small.
It's been over a hundred years that America could be viewed as the underdog, and pop culture teaches us never to root for the Big Lone Superpower, but when the little guys are murderous right-wing religious lunatics, aintcha glad that pop culture's got nothing on plain ol' common sense?
Shh...not so loud! The military is probably planning to outsource the manufacture of these robots to China.
Cruise missles isolate humans from the actual act of killing in war. Before that, ballistic missiles isolated humans from this awful task. Before that it was strategic bombing, and before that it was long range artillery, and before that it was the machine gun, and before that the rifle, which came after the cannon, the trebuchet, the arrow, the rock, and everything that wasn't some sort of cutting weapon weilded in close combat. This is a recurring whine, and little more than that.
The real concern is the number of human lives lost in stopping these recurring acts of idiocy. The actual effect of technological advancement has been to steadily reduce the number of combatant and noncombatant casualties as technology improved. Modern technology makes it possible to confront agression with less cost in human lives over shorter periods of time.
But if it assauges your sense of moral rectitude, we can go back to the days of sword-weilding armies and the concomitant casualty rates of 20-40% of entire populations during wars. We wouldn't be isolated at all from the act of killing -- a large plurality of us would have a constant connection with death, rather than our 1-2% or so who have intimate experience with it now.
If you think more experience with death promotes peace, talk to a Bosinan, or a Croat. They'll set you straight.
"...a nation whose principal exports are fast food, Hollywood movies, Internet cafes, arrogance, swagger, and democracy"
...and nuclear weapons, cultural imperialism, lowest-common-denominator entertainment, anti-intellectualism, gun culture, hyper-agressive business practices, corporate owned 'democracy', business by lawsuit, capitalism as religion, religion as capitalism, all-out economic war against it's supposed allies (cloaked in fluffy terms like 'globalisation' and 'free trade'), 18th-century labour and health policies... I could go on and on and on, but your last sentence just can't go unnoted:
"...but when the little guys are murderous right-wing religious lunatics, aintcha glad that pop culture's got nothing on plain ol' common sense?"
And when the people in charge of the Big Lone Superpower are murderous right-wing religious lunatics with a massive military, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons (and a history of actually using them), and effectively unchecked political power over the rest of the world, then please tell me, who are we supposed to root for?
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.