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Korea To Build Front-line Combat Robot
christchurch wrote to mention the story of a plucky Korean robot that has been built for combat. From the article: "According to design blueprints released during a meeting of science-related ministers, the robot will have six or eight extendable legs with wheels allowing it to move like an insect over uneven terrain. The robot will be armed with various weapons and will operate both by remote control and its own artificial intelligence system"
Yes, the USA, if I recall properly, has variations of their spy drone planes that are equipped with missle launchers. Likewise, there was an article a few months back about the US getting ready to deploy a heavily armed remote control tank-bot for "testing" in Iraq.
But, to date we have not yet equipped, to public knowledge, a robot with weaponry that is not purely remote controlled. Armed AI robots make people nervous, and for a variety of good reasons given our state of "AI".
Of course, we aren't talking a Skynet situation here(although some day that will likely be technically possible). Its more like not wanting a blue screen of death to literally kill you.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
You put a gun in an overweight nerds hand and shove him onto the battlefield and he's going to get killed very quickly. You put him behind the remote controls for one of these babies, and you'll have a lean-mean killing machine. Will nerds be the nest people to be drafted by the government? After all, all of those years training in Quake and Doom should make them experts wielding these babies.
I can see it now, Korea is at war with someone else using these on the battlefield. Kim and his friends want a LAN party, so they PAY the military to for an hours worth of time renting out 5 of these. They get behind their computers, and are suddenly transported to a battlefield and they go for it. Just make sure it's programmed so that the thing can't shoot allies (perhaps the allies emit a beacon) and the kids can go for their life, trying to frag as many people as they can. It'll be all the rage!
Well, we can certainly mount guns on things and shoot remotely. The current, long-developing trend in military warfare is towards smaller, versatile units that are hard to pin down but are extremely coordinated. Hive-like would be a wet-dream, but I'm sure beaurocrat is having such a dream as we speak. Bottom line, robots don't yet play into this dream. They are really only good as disposable long-range swiss-army knives. This will improve over time, of course. And as you read, the border patrol part is a focus as well.
This particular focus from SK seems to be a politically-pushed idea. Perhaps similar to the U.S. Star Wars idea in the 1980's (i.e. makes people happy, makes some contractors rich). North Korea weighs heavily on SK citizen's minds, partly because they hear so much crazy, horrible stuff about what happens in the country. Remember there is a huge infrantry deployment (for U.S. particularly) along the North Korean border, so any press about being able to one day replace these forces with robots is good press (who will hopefully just be sentrys really, because no one south of the meridian wants war).
Also, the South Koreans are fairly keen on technology in general, similar to the Japanese. Like all of us, they love to find excuses to play with robots and grant government contracts. The SK government has invested heavily in certain industries in the past and now the market seems to be sensing the technological shift. Yesterday (way back) the hot things were conventional transport like shipbuilding. Today its robots. So the story goes, if you can get a copy of the student roster at MIT, you can find out just what the South Koreans want to become leaders in. Though, I would add a few Japanese and Chinese schools to the list now as well.