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U.S. Army Robots Break Asimov's First Law

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fourth-law-is-don't-look-at-me-i'm-hideous dept.

buanzo writes "The US Army is deploying armed robots in Iraq that are capable of breaking Asmov's first law that they should not harm a human. SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems) robots are equipped with either the M249, machine gun which fires 5.56-millimeter rounds at 750 rounds per minute or the M240, which fires 7.62-millimeter rounds at up to 1,000 per minute. " update this story refers to this article from 2005. But com'on, robots with machine guns! I don't get to think about that most days!

17 of 821 comments (clear)

  1. Not really... by jargoone · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From TFA:

    They are still connected by radio to a human operator who verifies that a suitable target is within sight and orders it to fire.

    While they are harming a human, it's ultimately a human that makes the decision to fire. And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?

    1. Re:Not really... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And who cares about fictional "laws", anyway?

      I think it's this point that is the most salient. Asimov's laws are interesting, and make for good "debate over your adult beverage of choice" fodder, but they are just one persons take on a single use case for a particular technology. Those laws might make sense for industrial and domestic helper robots, but wouldn't apply for military (obviously) or law enforcement roles. Certainly a law enforcement robot could be trained to limit the amount of harm it inflicts on a perp to neutralize him, but some amount of harm may be necessary.

      Bottom line is that as robots actually do start entering more into our mainstream lives, some "real" thought needs to be given to how to make them as non harming to humans as possible. These laws, while laudible, can't be "programmed" as is, making the task much more complex.

    2. Re:Not really... by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Besides, the average marine has about a high school education, no morals and a low threshold for the sanctity of life. They might as well be robots anyways. :-)

      Sorry folks there ain't no draft and it isn't a mystery that the US war machine is a "tad" corrupt. you sign up for the military because you want to profit from the misery of others. That is unless you sign up for the military to do something outside of being a grunt [e.g. doctor, engineer, etc]. Then you're ok.

      These people you so casually dismiss as "robots" sign up, generally speaking, when they're eighteen or nineteen years old; they believe, almost without exception, that they are doing so to serve their country, to protect the Constitution and the flag and Mom and apple pie. And you know what? At most times throughout our country's history, they've been right.

      Just a few years later, if they're unlucky enough to have enlisted at a time like the current one, they're old men, scarred by things no human being should ever have to see. That's what war (any war, including the "good" ones) does to people. That doesn't happen to robots.

      I started out as one of those nineteen-year-old grunts; a couple of years later, dimly sensing what was coming down the pike, I cross-trained as a medic, in which capacity I served in Desert Storm. I had no desire whatsoever to "profit from the misery of others" -- I wanted to serve, and I was, relatively speaking, one of the lucky ones. I don't have anyone's death on my conscience. I do have memories of things that will give me nightmares and flashbacks for the rest of my life ... and mine was a very, very short war. What those kids over there are going through now is so much worse I can't quite get my mind around it.

      They're not robots. They're your son, your niece, your little brother, caught up in a horrible situation not of their own making. Don't take your anger out on them. Save it for the evil old men who never exposed themselves to that kind of horror, who would never allow their own children to go through it, who casually, thoughtlessly, cheerfully send other people's kids off to hell.

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    3. Re:Not really... by macdaddy357 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      A lot of people think Asimov's laws are real, and don't get it that he was a sci-fi writer, not a scientist in the field of robotics. He was even asked to speak at universities as an expert on robotics when all he had done was write some stories. If they had read the robot novels, they would have noticed that even Asimov's robots did not always obey the laws.

      --
      How ya like dat?
    4. Re:Not really... by rk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I thought the point of Asimov's stories was that they always obeyed the laws, but not necessarily in ways humans would. Most stories in "I, Robot" show that these seemingly excellent and fault-tolerant laws could have unexpected and sometimes dangerous consequences of their own, and that the real-world is too complicated to ever be dealt with only hard and fast rules.

      You're right though, I never understood why people took Asimov's laws as a great thing to use as a reference for robot behavior when the same author who created them proceeds to point out their flaws for an entire book's worth of short stories.

    5. Re:Not really... by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." --Thomas Jefferson

      I hate to break it to you, but there will always be those who seek to prey on the defenseless. You could get the entire world to lay down their arms and disband their militaries, but all you'd accomplish is to encourage the next Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, or Joseph Stalin to raise an army and conquer all those foolish enough to be defenseless. The worst part of it is that their soldiers would consist of idealists who would think that they're bettering the world by spreading Communism, Facism, Eugenics, or other political idea of the day.

      A particularly ugly example of this was the conquisitors of the "New World" who sought to obtain land and slaves for Spain, all under the guise of spreading Catholic Christianity. The Crusades are another ugly example of this, though we could be here all day trying to analyze those events.

      --
      Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
    6. Re:Not really... by AlterTick · · Score: 5, Insightful
      A lot of people think Asimov's laws are real, and don't get it that he was a sci-fi writer, not a scientist in the field of robotics. He was even asked to speak at universities as an expert on robotics when all he had done was write some stories. If they had read the robot novels, they would have noticed that even Asimov's robots did not always obey the laws.

      Indeed, I think anyone who reads "I, Robot" and comes away with the notion that the Three Laws are a good idea should be barred from working in robotics entirely. Asimov's short robot stories drive home again and again how those hard-coded, inviolable laws are a very, very bad thing, and taken to their ultimate end, could result in the human race basically being reduced to animals in a robot zoo! Seriously, I think too many people read "I, Robot" when they were too young to grasp the serious philosophical point behind it, and haven't bothered to re-read it since.

      The book uses robots as an analogy for a very serious philosophical point about humanity: codified rules are not a suitable replacement for people educated in ethics, science, and rational thinking. No set of laws, commandments, edicts, or mandates passed from On High will ever match every situation. Knowledge is the only way forward.

      --
      Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
    7. Re:Not really... by Fordiman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah. The US War machine is a tad corrupt. That's why they spend billions of dollars figuring out how to win wars with a minimal loss of life.

      I don't know if anyone actually realizes this, but the Vietnam debacle lost about twice as many lives in the opening weeks of combat that afghanistan and iraq combined. Whatever the motivations behind our incursions on other countries (mostly it has to do with what currency they want to trade for oil), we're getting better at getting the job done without killing too many people.

      And yes, civillians die. As nobody's perfect, war is like that. If you wanna be bitchy and insulting, be bitchy and insulting to Bush, Cheney and their puppeteers, not the marines. They're trained with a purpose. And, like a health inspector, they're doing what they're paid - and legally required - to do.

      Meanwhile, MARINES stands for "My Ass Rides In Navy Equipment, Sir!"

      (I'm an ex-navy nuke. I can make jokes like that. Just not in front of a marine. Those fuckers are like Extreme Sports punks, only less stupid and more muscley.)

      --
      110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
    8. Re:Not really... by roman_mir · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If they had read the robot novels, they would have noticed that even Asimov's robots did not always obey the laws. - you should reread the short stories then, because those robots always obeyed the laws since they were hardwired to break if they tried to violate the first law. The point of Asimov's stories was to show that in this world the idea of absolute laws doesn't work. The absolute laws do not cover every situation and often paradoxes are created where the law, that is followed to strictly, causes some sort of an unintended and often harmful result. This happens because the robots followed the letter but not the spirit of the law.

      Same thing obviously applies to humans, this is why Asimov's stories are such an interesting read and will never become out of date.

      --
      You can't handle the truth.
  2. Re:Am I the only one... by daveschroeder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    dada21,

    Are you being serious?

    The "government" has had weapons that the "citizens" cannot (easily) gain access to for more than a century. How is this different?

    Or is this just a pulpit for you since you caught the article early?

    (The "government" will ALWAYS have more sophisticated weaponry, because it is pooling the resources of the citizenry to design, develop, build, and purchase such weaponry. Your discussion is interesting for a philosophical debate; nothing more.)

  3. Ridiculous Laws by Illserve · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The very idea of a rule against hurting humans implies that a robot knows:

    1. What hurting means
    is it pain? death? financial impact? what about indirect effects? If I help human 1 build a better mousetrap, I am indirectly harming some other human's way of life.

    2. What people are

    3. Where they are

    These are highly non trivial problems. In fact, they're unsolvable to any degree of certainty. They only make sense in a *science fiction* book in which a highly talented author is telling you a story. In the real world, they are meaningless because of their computational intractibility.

    In the real world, we use codes of ethics and/or morality. Such codes recognize the fact that there are no absolutes and sometimes making a decision that will ultimately cause harm to someone is inevitable.

    So can we please stop with these damned laws already?

  4. The problem is... by everphilski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You have to convince all 200+ countries to demilitarize. Simultaneously. You won't be able to.

    End of story.

    I'd rather return to the "No Standing Army" policy of individual state militias that can be called up to defend our borders in the event of a real declared war.

    ... because the problem with that is "individual state militias" can't afford ICBM's, helicopters, attack aircraft, missiles, etc. We now have a defenseless America, and the rest of the world is up to speed. The state of war has been beyond the militia for over 150 years now. You have to prepare for the war 20 years from now, not the war at hand.

    The beauty of modern warfare is very few people die relative to former wars. We've only lost around 2,000 men and women in Iraq so far and although it is a trajedy (not the war, but the loss) it is far less than wars of the same scale in years prior. Technology makes the difference.

    1. Re:The problem is... by 10Ghz · · Score: 4, Insightful
      The beauty of modern warfare is very few people die relative to former wars.


      Well, not exactly. As it happens, there just hasn't been a war as large-scale as some of the past wars have been. Lots of people died in WW1 and WW2. WW2 killed more than WW1, partly due to more advanced methods of killing. But since WW2 we have just had relatively minor wars. Iraq War is pretty small potatoes, and even it resulted in something like 100.000 deaths. Vietnam (a lot smaller than either World Wars) caused over 2 million deaths. Korean Wars caused millions of casualties as well, but I don't know the number of deaths. So the amount of casualties have been relatively high, even though the wars have been very limited in length and/or scope when compared to the World Wars.

      We've only lost around 2,000 men and women in Iraq so far


      Conveniently forgetting all those dead Iraqis (civilian and others alike) eh?
      --
      Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
    2. Re:The problem is... by Johnny5000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We've only lost around 2,000 men and women in Iraq so far and although it is a trajedy (not the war, but the loss) it is far less than wars of the same scale in years prior. Technology makes the difference.

      Even if we don't include the Iraqi dead/wounded (as others have pointed out,)
      don't forget that tens of thousands of US soliders have been severely injured by wounds that would have killed them in previous conflicts... but thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, they are "only" missing limbs, permanently brain-damaged, etc.

      many pro-war supporters like to trot out the "only 2000 killed" line, while not being quite so forthcoming with the severely-injured count.

      --
      The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
  5. Re:Am I the only one... by jcr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I firmly believe in the right to bear arms -- all arms.

    Sorry, have to differ with you there. I don't want a tac nuke in private hands, because I don't believe you're capable of only hitting those who are actually posing a threat to you personally. I also wouldn't let you have land mines, pursuant to the common law principle of prohibiting reckless endangerment.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  6. A few thoughts.... by Savage-Rabbit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    First: two observations:

    1) SWORD is remote controlled it is not autonomous like I always thought a true robot in the Asimovian sense had to be.
    2) Since we are now including remotely operated vehicles in the definition of a true robot, SWORD is not that different from a Paveway bomb or a Hellfire missile except SWORD doesn't self destruct when it destroys the target.

    This begs the question wasn't Asimov's first law broken decades ago, perhaps even by the V1 which was strictly speaking a remote operated vehicle?

    Personally I won't begin to worry about Asimovs laws as long as Humans are on the other end. apons.

    --
    Only to idiots, are orders laws.
    -- Henning von Tresckow
  7. Less blood for more oil by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful
    America's suburban lifestyle requires oil. Getting that oil has a price in blood. America's robot armies will insure that less of that blood is American.

    That's the reality.