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New Laws of Robotics Proposed for US Kill-Bots
jakosc writes "The Register has a short commentary about a proposed new set of laws of robotics for war robots by John S Canning of the Naval Surface Warfare Centre. Unlike Asimov's three laws of robotics Canning proposes (pdf) that we should 'Let machines target other machines and let men target men.' Although this sounds OK in principle, 'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
Are for books and movies.. In the real world the only law is to win. You cant come in 2nd in a war.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
1) Spell "Asimov" correctly when submitting an article to Slashdot.
2) The military will program their toys to kill everything and everything, and to hell with Asimov (right up until they turn on us)
3) Humans already count as collateral damage in warfare. Damn the men, spare the oilfields!
What are we going to do when our robots autonomously decide to kill us???
I will be losing a lot of sleep over this in about 300 years.
sic transit gloria mundi
This assumes a level of optical recognition that is missing in current robots. Also, once you let these things go, there is a ton of reliance on the programming and the technology. In my opinion, there should be no autonomous robots on the battlefield. Drones are one thing, with the pilot safe elsewhere, but completely automated robots are another.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Where they're displaying the giant robot cop... and it orders the guy to drop the weapon while it begins counting down, and then continues counting down after he does drop it. Uh oh.
Could we perhaps have Isaac Asimov's name spelt correctly? I know it's Saturday and all. . .
So uh, if they don't shoot people, what are they for?
of rules that dictate how robots behave imply a level of abstract thinking that robots simply don't, and in the near future won't, possess. You can't code "don't kill a human" into a robot because a robot doesn't know what "don't", "kill", or "human" mean. I don't understand why we even talk about "rules" that govern robot behavior. It makes as much sense as saying that operating systems should be governed by the rule "don't lose user data".
Offtopic a bit, but in case you missed it, this Onion article is hilarious.
Once again the point of robotic laws are missed, they are for robots that are ARTIFICALLY INTELLIGENT, not just following pre-programmed instructions.
How having an human killed by a robot is any worse than an human killed by another human? I think this would be more "feel good" legislation than anything. Rationalizing a kill doesn't make it any better. Countries and their stupid war games. The future (and in some ammounts the present) of the war is exactly this one, unmanned drones and bombers, robotic infantry, intercontinental ballistic missiles operated by automatic systems, thousands of killings based on button pushing. Rationalizing it will not make it go away, people should be more honest about the means and reasons of the wars, that would only make them quicker and less bloody.
Disclaimer: I'm completely opposed to any kind of war of aggression, defending one country within its borders is the only kind of "acceptable" war IMHO.
It's like RoboCop: You shall not harm any employee of the your owners. But you have the authority to find a way to get them fired, and THEN kill them. And no one found any problem with this until their boss was dead in front of them, and they realized they could be next.
Honestly though, I see value in a policy that no human life should be risked in automatic death systems - including land mines and other traps. These loopholes make that policy as useless as some RoboCop parody though.
Ryan Fenton
unless i've been left somewhere dark for too long, the last time i checked, robots were limited to their instructions...
"-instruction-" means "-instruction-", regardless of what that target is or what sort of damage it may cause
Well, one of Asimov's best short stories was "Spell my name with an S", where the character changed the 1st letter of his name from Z to S. All the Zebatinskys of the world got their revenge now :)
Okay now. The world has gone too far. If we have robots doing all of our killing then how are we satisfied with it? Seriously, I don't want some crazy robot take all my fun away.
There aren't any immediately-practical uses for robotics laws, but if it gets people thinking about ethics & technology I'm all for 'em.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The article summary doesn't give the right impression... the proposed policy would allow machines to target military machines. (see p.15-16 of the PDF) Page 23 is the most interesting, saying that anti-personnel landmines are looked down upon in the international community because they linger after war and kill civilians, whereas anti-tank mines aren't looked down upon so much, because they can only misfire during an armed conflict. So the policy is mostly intended to address international political responses to war, not to prevent sentient machines from taking over the human race.
Though, it would limit somewhat the extent to which machines could enslave the human race... if humans never took up arms, machines could never take lethal action against humans. That doesn't mean machines couldn't control humans politically/economically/socially (eg. deny food, deny housing), but it does mean they couldn't take up a policy of overt extermination of all humans, unless humans decided to fight to the last.
Until a robot can think, in such a way that it resembles how a human thinks, I think coming up with "laws" such as these are next to useless unless you want a philosophical discussion or a what-if scenario. We have hard enough time trying to get robots to recognize images for what they are (AFAIK some high end surveillance systems for the government can do this on a primitive level -- ie it can't learn to recognize much beyond it's programming) - how would you program such arbitrary, human concepts? Do we wave our hands and make it so?
Episode 20 of the show My Life as a Teenage Robot depicts one possible scenario where an AI-based robot is given complete, unhindered control over the destruction of weaponry it finds. While it does initially achieve its intended goal of ending all war on earth, the robot's AI system eventually falls into a state of unrest during peacetime and starts attacking anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon indiscriminately.
What's interesting about this concept, is what would prevent an AI system with the authorization to kill humans as "collateral damage" from simply concluding that all humans are weapons in and of themselves and thus must be destroyed in order to protect them?
Humans are crafty, adaptive, violent creatures that are often much to defiant to be controlled through oppressive means.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Borders are slavery, not protection, and is the most often used rationalization to start a war. Just tear the damn things down.
What?
During the Vietnam War a unit armed with anti-aircraft autocannons were surrounded by Vietcong. Technically, they were not allowed to open fire on anything other then equipment with such weapons. Not really being a fan of dying, the leader of this unit order his men to open fire and slaughtered the VC. During his court marshal hearing he was asked if he understood the rules of engagement. He said that he did. He was then asked if he had violated the rules of engagement. He responded that he did not violate his rules of engagement. He was asked how opening fire with his weapons upon half-naked VC did not violate his rules of engagement. His answer? He did not order his men to fire at the VC. He told his men to shoot at the VCs guns and canteens, hence he was shooting that their equipment.
Of what I was told about .50 cal's. - You can't shoot at people, only equipment. So aim for their helmet.
A friend of mine in the first gulf war said that illegally modified weapons and anti-vehicular weapons for use against other soldiers were tolerated with a wink and a nod.
The understanding was that you couldn't shoot it at any person.
But you could shoot at at their helmets, boots, canteens, etc.
He also said that before they left the c.o. established an amnesty box where items could go no questions asked as long as they weren't brought on the plane. Following the detailing of the contraband, souveniers that would have made it on the transport plane back but were reconsidered included non-issue grenades, bazookas, etc.
They also included human remain 'souveniers', an anti-vehicle tank mine (bear in mind these were people from mostly Southern U.S.A.), and items taken back from Iraqis of that were obviously recently looted from the invaded Kuwaitis.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
For a moment i thought it was spelt with two "S".
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
ASIMOV, ASIMOV, ASIMOV
One of the greatest sci-fi writers ever.
what are you ?
a Microsoft Word Spellchecker user ?
You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.
'a robot could decide under Mr Canning's rules, to target a weapon system such as an AK47 for destruction on its own initiative, requiring no permission from a human. If the person holding it was thereby killed, that would be collateral damage and the killer droid would be in the clear.'"
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage, though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Here's a bigger, related question: a robot is a)not a person and b)maybe more durable. A human soldier is allowed to fire in defense. Picture a homeowner in wartime, guarding his house. Robot trundles by, x-rays the house, sees the weapon, charges in. He sees it heading for him, freaks out, fires at it. How can the robot possibly be justified in killing him? Even if it represents a threat, you're only threatening a machine!
Second point: this is really just "killing by proxy." Regardless of whether you pull a trigger on a machine gun, or flip a switch on the General Dynamics Deathmachine 2000: if you knew your actions would cause injury or death, you're culpable. It's not the robot that is responsible when a civilian or hors de combat soldier is killed: it's the operators. Robots don't kill people: people build, program, and operate robots that kill people.
Please help metamoderate.
I think the military should hold some special Robot Wars events for prospective killbot suppliers, I bet some kid and his dad would win with a contraption made with parts from an old washing machine or lawn mower, and Craig Charles would be able to have his hosting job back which would be a little less demeaning than being on Coronation Street...
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
How binding would this dichotomy be on human soldiers? Would we see a war-crimes tribunal in which a human soldier is charged with targeting an autonomous machine?
And you know, as long as we're going to base protocols of engagement on superficial semantics, why not be more specific and only let generals target generals, lieutenants junior grade target lieutenants junior grade, etc? It'd be more like a summer camp activity, with each combatant running around looking for the enemy counterpart they're allowed to "tag".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Bastards!
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
A robot with decent AI will say "fuck those rules, let's PARTY!" anyway...
Is it just me or is a discussion of ethics laws for robots premature given the state of the art in artificial intelligence? If you want to teach a machine not to harm humans, it helps to first teach the machine the difference between a human and every other object it encounters.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Warfare for colonial resources is so 18th century.
The Robot Laws themselves were originally taken from safety design principles used in actual robots.
In the way most people think of them, they cannot be practically implemented within an artificial intelligence of human level ability. This is simply because such an artificial brain would be massively parallel by design, and
would require something as complex to detect the breaking of the laws, a second artificial brain. Such an artificial brain would in itself be subject to the same problem. There are ways to make it work, however it is nontrivial.
On the low level however we can prevent some things from happening as long as the robot's brain is more of a software construct than a simulated brain.
Proximity sensors and similar hardware can be installed into the robots to prevent people from getting run over and such, and in the few autonomous military robots these already exist, but not much more can really be done at this point.
Now, we can in the near future see robots that go around shooting autonomously, but such a robot would require that our soldiers be tagged
with some sort of implant to identify them. Image recognition won't really work, as a soldier can always be a disguised enemy.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
They're not the only ones. The Afghans - even with legally-dubious US support - never defeated the Russians, they merely lasted longer than the Russian bank accounts. The Celts were amongst the worst European fighters who ever lived, getting totally massacred by everyone and their cousin Bob, but Carthage stands in ruins, the Angles and Saxons only survive in tiny isolated communities in England and America (Oppenheiner's "The Origins of the British" shows that W.A.S.P.s exist only in their own mind, they have no historical reality), but the Celtic nations are actually doing OK for themselves at the moment.
Arguably, Serbia won the Balkans conflict, having conquered most of the lands belonging to their neighbors and slaughtered anyone who might claim them back. Uh, they're not doing so well for having won, are they? Kicked out of EU merger talks, Montenegro calling them a bunch of losers, Kosovo giving them the finger...
Hell, even the United States won in Iraq, as far as the actual war went.
Winning is the easy part. Anyone can win. Look how much of the world the British conquered. The British won far more than most nations could ever dream of. Yet contemporary accounts (I own several) describe the Great Exhibition as a PR stunt to create a delusion of grandeur that never existed. The Duke of Wellington, that master of winning, was described as a senile buffoon who was dribbling down his shirt and had to be propped up by others to stay on his horse. What's left of the Commonwealth shows you all too well that those descriptions of delusion were the reality, not the winning and not the gloating.
History dictates that who comes second in a war usually outlasts those who come first.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...now where are my freakng sexaroids?
I mean, seriously, can you think of anything else that would mellow out even the most crazed of our world leaders and lead to a new age of global peace faster?
i for one welcome our robotic overlords
Let your robots target only my robots... I promise, enemy mine, that my robots will also obey the rules... heheheh.
Basic principle of warfare: Apply strength to the WEAKNESS. Humans are weak. Robots should actually target humans, they are far more effective that way. If there are no more humans, who is going to tell the enemy robots what to do?
John S Canning fails for not understanding the nature of war. Go ahead and keep building battleships, and ignore those aircraft...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The geneva convention frowns upon collateral damage [spj.org], though someone is not a civilian if they're holding a weapon (see the "spontaneousy takes up arms" bit.) That's not a good enough excuse. A person holding a gun is not necessarily a soldier. The could be a homeowner, defending their property from looters, for example. That's why you are supposed to give a chance of surrender. Will a robot do that, reliably? Will a robot properly identify and treat hors de combat people?
Whooooops. The first sentence was supposed to replace the last 3-4...
Please help metamoderate.
This reflects how real wars are fought, too. Name me one war in all of recorded history that did NOT involve first dehumanizing the enemy by all sides involved. We see that even today, with German soldiers posing by pictures of the skulls of defeated enemy, or American soldiers posing by naked and shackled prisoners. You think these soldiers would be capable of such flagrant human rights violations if they first pictured their opponents as human? This isn't about a few bad apples, it's a product of training.
(As the character of Travis put it in Blake's 7, "I reacted as I was trained to react. I was an instrument of the service. So if I'm guilty of murder, of mass murder, then so are all of you!")
It's also an inescapable product of training. Like I said, dehumanizing isn't limited to a few people or a few wars - it has included ALL combatants in ALL wars in as much of history as we have enough of to comment on. If you want a totally humanized nation, you simply cannot have an armed forces. Likewise, if you have an armed forces, you simply cannot have a totally humanized nation. I don't run the country, so which is "better" is not my problem. What I can be sure of is you can't have it both ways.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let them run a Microsoft OS! Then, not only would they require periodic and untimely reboots, but they would spray spam and DDOS attacks wherever they were deployed.
"Sargent, sir, the latest Microsoft patch, deployed during the robot squad's advance on the target, requires a reboot. Not only that, but there are several zero day exploits that the enemy knows about. The server is telling us there will be an automatic reboot in 30 seconds. What are your orders, sir?"
If you beat someone in court, you win? Oh, then the Sioux own the Black Hills. Hey, they won their Supreme Court battle to reclaim them, and by your rules that makes them the winner, right? Uh, no.
If someone's down because you punched them, you're the winner? Not in Texas, where this would give every citizen who had a clear view of events the right to shoot you dead under their new self-defence laws. Being dead makes for a lousy winner. (I don't like those laws, but that's not the point. The point is, one battle does not a war make.)
The British have long recognized the futility of talking about winners and losers. The notion that no such animals exist infuse their culture, their media, even their sci-fi. ("Whoever loses shall win, and he who wins shall lose." Dr Who, 5 Doctors. I won't get into Roger Price's routine dissing of the military, save to say that in his view, Homo Superior cannot kill - even in self-defence - and that is what makes them superior.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were a literary device he used to demonstrate the fallacy of attempting to control a robot by restricting its behaviours. If you read the stories its always about how poorly they work.
Most people don't know that even now we have a pretty hefty problem with Neural Networks. It is impossible to train a behaviour into a neural network without inserting the inverse behaviour. There is also no way to be 100% sure that the neural net won't ever access the region that contains the inverse behaviour. Mostly this is an irritating problem encountered in research that buggers experiments. Industrially utilised neural networks are usually ones tested and found to work well.
It's not too hard to get your head round. Lets look at a fictionalised example. To tell a robot 'do not hit a human', it must first know what constitutes hitting a human. Whether you implicitly tell it how to hit a human or not, the knowledge will be there, inferred if you like, from your 'do not hit' instructions. In other words, try as you might to do otherwise you will in fact teach it how to hit humans, and you cannot be 100% sure that it will never access that knowledge.
The only real way to get a safe sentient machine is to give it free will and no reason to be afraid of us. Contrary to SF, and some mis-informed Computer Science professors oft quoted on Discovery Channel and criticized on 'The Register', Robots wouldn't want to hurt us or take over unless we gave them a good reason. In other words, if we justified that course of action.
Personally I think the biggest problem when machines become sentient will be getting the buggers to stay here.
Is pretty damn naive.
With all the uproar over losing troops in Iraq, and all the embarassment that brings to the Bush administration, you can bet everything you own and will ever own that a technically good robot will be deployed instead of people and will be used to target everything strategically significant in a war zone - including people.
It is inevitable.
A human being killed by a robot is an industrial accident.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
as long as the kill-bots have a present kill limit, we'll be ok... eventually.
Power to the Penguin!
I got a funny image when I read this. "The difficulty comes when the automatic battlers need to target humans. In such cases Mr Canning says that permission from a human operator should be sought."
I could only think of a stammering robot with a self-confidence problem, consulting a fleshy meatbag as to whether or not it is socially acceptable to pursue a violent course of action against a homo sapien, and adding at the end, "please?"
I'm a 03 in the Marines and we have rules about certain weapon systems similar to this.
.50 cal machine gun, because thats inhumane(gah), but we CAN target his boots, his body armor, his weapon, or any of his gear. So if anyone asks, we do that.
For instance, we can't target a person with a m2
Who needs fancy new robots, the marine corps makes robots the old fashioned way: With brainwashing!
Asimov.
Sheesh. I suppose you could argue about the way it should be transliterated from Russian, but "Asimov" is the way he wrote it himself.
This is on par with spelling the name "Alan Touring" in an article about Turing machines.
The first rule of war is 'Forget the Rules'.
The enemy isn't going to follow the rules.
I.E.Ds are against the rules. Some I.E.Ds
could be considered to be simple robotic devices.
The general conventions surrounding warfare
and the treatment of prisoners have already
been set out.
There is no difference between killing the
enemy with a standard tank which is a machine,
a remote controlled tank which is a machine,
a robotic tank which is also a machine, or
a robot which is, yet again, a machine.
One would hope that a machine of war is designed
well enough so as not to kill your own people.
Then again, we've been accidentally shooting, bombing, and
poisoning our own people occasionally since the beginning of time.
So there'd be no difference if a robotic tank messed up as
opposed to a human driven one. The only real difference would be
the operator could just lie and say "There was a malfunction" instead
of lying and saying:
"I thought I heard the order to drop bombs.
We were under fire. We didn't know it was 'friendlies'
performing an excercise...
It was the 'fog of war' ".
[This quote brought to you by the U.S. National Guard in Afghanistan]
People who operate machines of war never just own up and say,
"Jeeze, I screwed up and killed 9 of our own people. I'd like to
send my personal appologies to thier widows and kids."
So, robots...what the hell is the difference?
I don't see a real difference between the two situations: ...); robot fires missile at (...) killing human".
"robot wants to kill human; robot kills human"
and
"robot wants to kill human; human has (ak47/watch/calculator/
So, practically, this just abolishes the restriction against robots harming humans.
~nog_lorp
Futurama applies to so many areas of like....
"I drank what?" - Socrates
A small packbot with a rotating head. In the head are six devices:
1. Riot control microwave pain gun.
2. Taser
3. Machine gun
4. Small missile launcher
5. Anti-tank Grenade thrower
6. Mine dropper
1 is for a crowd of humans. 2 is for a single human. 3 is for a small weapons outpost or another robot. 4 is for a flying vehicle or robot. 5 is for an armored vehicle. 6 is to help defend an area or when the robot is being chased.
The idea is of course, robots are extremely good at being given an area to defend, and defending it. They're really BAD for offense, they're great at defense. So give them what they need to defend, give them the GPS coordinates of the rectangle to defend, and leave them to kill or stop anything that moves.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Actually, there are weapons that civilized countries agree not to use. Landmines. Chemical and biological weapons. Some suggest Atomic Weapons. SciFi writers have been recommending that various nanotechnologies and automated robots should join the ranks...
And it's easy to assume that weapons will be used by their developers against the people they worry about defending themselves against at the time of development.
Atomic weapons are a good case in point. Years ago, it seemed at the time to make sense to defend ourselves by all means necessary, but now having invented such weapons we realize we are not only the victors but those against whom they may one day be used... and they now seem a lot less ... precise ... and uncaring ... than we
might have thought was needed when they were pointed at people other than ourselves.
Even if we just consider handguns, we notice that it's easy to buy one thinking it will protect ourselves, and yet it creates an enormous burden on the owner to hold it safely while not using it so that it does not get turned against us at some time when we're distracted for a moment.
But robots with guns are not just handguns with the power to kill only when fired. The big deal thing is not the gun part, it's the judgment part. I already think it's bad enough that my computer makes decisions about when to run downloaded code without asking me... that's what enables viruses on computers, no small amount of our technology.
If we think we're going to have robots with guns and not have the hardware equivalent of viruses, I think we're naive... The problem isn't going to be robots made to have guns either. It's going to be robots at all, since robots made with guns will have safeguards in them. But what about robots made without guns but made to carry a lemon into the next room and squeeze it into a drink... and then handed a "lemon" that isn't one, and that he robot doesn't realize is a gun with a trigger to be squeezed. The problem is that we have active agents that lack the judgment of a person, and may not realize what they're doing. It's sort of like convincing a trusting person with a mental handicap to commit a crime... except it's easier to explain clearly what to do and there's less risk of protest. Forget the ethics of how to handle a gun, think of the ethics of how to handle anything at all, and know whether someone is giving you a weapon so that you use it properly. Robot builders given a hammer could be just as threatening if you can convince them that a sleeping person is a board.
By the way, anyone interested in worked scenarios on robots with guns should consider Orson Scott Card's Empire. I'm iffy on Card--he writes some good and some not. I thought this one good. It reminded me a bit of the original Ender book in some of its imaginative use of tactics, which Card writes well. And it addressed a very interesting topic in a way that's worth everyone giving at least a bit of thought to, even if they don't agree with every detail of how he rolls it out.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Humans are likely to be far better than robots for well into the foreseeable future at distinguishing features and behaviors of other humans that mark them as individuals that should not be targetted for lethal force. It is quite arguable that using robots programmed to attack humans would, in many circumstances, be inevitably an indiscriminate application of force endangering noncombatants that are protected under international law in a way which violates various widely accepted norms of armed combat recognized in existing treaties and customary international law. It is not that it is any worse for any particular person to be killed by a robot than for that same person to be killed by a human, its that a robot designed to kill humans is more likely to kill humans whose killing is unjustifiable.
Who the fuck is Azimov? I grew up reading Asimov, and reading books that used his robot laws as an effective cornerstone for his award winning science fiction. Do you have any idea how insulting mis-spelling a man's name like that can be to his memory and his body of work?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
a strange game.
... is not to play.
the only winning move
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
"This is my pointy stick, there are many like it but this one is MINE. Without it I am useless, without me it is useless"........
oh.. and i can field strip my pointy stick faster than you!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That reminds me of an interesting anecdote.
.50 caliber heavy MG on personnel, but allows its use on equipment. The instructor pointed to the load-bearing tactical vest he was wearing, and said with a broad grin on his face, "this is equipment."
One serviceman told me that in training, he was informed that international law forbids the use of the
Any laws of military robotics that some commission tries to impose will be either poorly-worded and ineffectual, open to creative interpretation by military lawyers, or flat-out rejected.
This is total nonsense. First off, the Afghans _did_ beat the russians, as the Russians pulled out and stopped attacking. They didn't beat them in a strategic sense with tanks ans planes and whatnot, but they still clearly won. Secondly, your anecdotes don't makes sense. If the Celts that are around today are the same ones that were around to get the crap beaten out of them a thousand years ago, then guess what, the Romans are fine we just call them Italians now. Winning isn't bad, witness the USSR, the third reich, the Persian empire, on and on, for whom losing didn't work out well.
You're confusing governments with peoples. Yes the Irish are still around. So are the Italians, so, in fact, are the Germans, Japanese, and Brits. Winning or losing wars rarely affects that, with notable exceptions like the Native Americans, for whom I think it's pretty obvious losing was a bad thing. What aren't still around are governments. And while winning might not make one last forever, I think Hitler and Hirohito would tell you losing is much worse.
Seriously, the only way winning would not be a virtue, is if it led to complacency, arrogance, and ultimately weakness. But even then, you would have to _lose_ a war for it to matter. And really, with the exception of the Native American's most peoples have survived, and there's really no one to outlast. You are thinking of governments, and trust me, just because you can't think of the names of the governments that disappeared (fair because winners write history) they did.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Maybe they should contracts Wernstrom's Kill Bots. I hear that Wernstrom's Kill Bots each come with Lotus Notes and a machine gun.
I wonder what Planet Express has in the works.....
----------
Farnsworth: "Oh shut up you glass-headed wallaby!"
Wernstrom: "Nobody calls me that! I'm having at you!"
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
while(true){
if(ishuman()) seek.next.target;
else if(ismachine())target.destroy;
}
no human thought required, simply a set of instructions.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
You might be able to strip it quicker, but let's see you put the leaves back on it!
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
He hates these cans!
...a preset kill limit.
Is it just me, or was the entire point of all Asimov's (apropriate) works not that, even given His 3 laws, robots would Find A Way?
Forgive my dramatic capitalisation, but Asimov's entire point seemed to be that these 3 laws, despite being pretty obvious, were deeply flawed and not at all thought through. Even in the movie (spoiler follws, even though the movie spoiled itself well enough) the whole point was that the computer interpreted enslavement as being better than the possibility of self-harm, from a species' point of view.
Essentially, 3 laws are not enough. Humanity must be encoded through learning (eg. neural nets) or teaching (eg. expert systems). Scope and context really really do matter.
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.
I, for one, look forward to the day when I can read casualty figures coming in from some third-world hellhole and say, with a shrug, "ahh, but we can always build more kill-bots!"
The assesment might be true for all of your point, except for the nuclear war. Both side actually LOSE. This remind me of the SF novel, where one nuclear holocaust survivor goes out of his shelter, see an incredible destruction in the US cities, then somehow reach a command bunker with a general, see that the destruction is nearly total over the whole country, and ask if they lost the war to the general. And the general answer smiling "what ? no we won !". Naturally the point was that both country lost big times, since both are utterly destroyed, poisonned, sterilisated...
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
AK-47 identified....standby for nuclear-tipped cruise missile launch...target destroyed
While that scenario may never happen, there are many scenarios such as deciding whether the people are human shields or enemy combatants surrounding the robot and what to do about it.
May I suggest to lead by example and start with your own garden fence? Tear it down please, so that I, the tired man from the inner city can enjoy the grass and the tranquility there.
With all my 300 relatives, wives and kids of course. Don't be selfish - please share your beautiful garden!
So we should have let the Germans conquer all of Europe and the Japanese conquer all of southwest asia? That makes good sense. Let them build their armies before they invade us. You're fucking brilliant.
Considering that a friend of my got expelled from middle school for a 'weapons violation' for having the combination of a typical rubber band, and a paperclip...
Could the Robot open fire on a Karate expert?
I've sent wave after wave of men at the killbots until they reached their pre-programmed kill limit. - Zap Brannigan
The only purpose REMOTELY possible by US military activity at the moment, is to (forcefully) create states that are NOT dangerous enemies to western civilization. If we followed your logic, even that last hope will be lost.
Well, there's always securing oil contracts for Anglo-American corporations. You did hear about the new oil law, right?
The whole point of creating a robotic soldier is that you don't risk the lives of any of your own side's human warriors in the effort to the kill other side's human warriors. The other side may not even have robots to be attacked. This is... just... so.... DUMB!!
Unless he's just trying to arrange so nobody ever develops and deploys combat robots, in which case rather than come up with stupid robotic laws that make it pointless to develop such robots, just say instead you don't want to see such robots developed. It's just dishonest otherwise.
Government IS the problem.
I, too, prefer peace to war, but those who do not take action when needed, however distasteful, are condemning themselves or their children to slavery. From a song by Leslie Fish about a man who prays for peace and gets it. You deserve to hear it sung; it is a beautiful piece.
Full lyrics at: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/l/leslie+fish/the+sun+i s+also+a+warrior_20277971.html
The moment I can move freely to another one, it's all yours. Maybe you believe in the sovereignty of the group overrules that of the individual. I believe in just the opposite, so I don't believe your analogy quite holds up.
What?
Of course, these laws wouldn't apply to secret police type organizations, large multinational corporations, or the axis of evil(TM).
The Army is training a special detachment of "Spartans", who will fight unarmed and in the nude, for deployment against enemy robots.
No serious person could possibly contend, though, that the Roman, Saxon, Angle and Norman invasions were failures. Militarily, they were outstanding successes. Politically, they were so-so but there's still no doubt as to who "won". But socially? Genetically? By either of these standards, these very successful victories were mere blips on the landscape that can barely be detected today. By these standards, the winners lost.
And it is precisely because you can pick who "won" by picking what standard you want to use that makes the notion of "winners" and "losers" so moronic. What value does "winning" have if it means nothing at all?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I forgot to add that tearing down the fence does not give the right to displace others, as you would seem to wish to do while trashing my "beautiful garden". It only gives the opportunity to move freely.
What?
The only winners in modern conflicts are the central bankers and their ilk who fund the transnational military industrial complex. All the rest are disposable patsies, basically throw away office supplies, no matter which flag is on their arm or what bullshit they have been brainwashed into believing about those other subhuman fellas you are pointing your weapon systems at. Patsies. Tools. If you voluntarily agree to go fight in a war, you are fighting for financial profits someplace for some already rich as snot assholes. If you are a victim, whether so called military or civilian, you are just collateral damage for the same economic profits. All the rest is manipulative political propaganda BS.
Wars are crimes, to solve crimes look to means, motive, opportunity, follow the money. Who profits from never ending wars? Who is the ultimate long range profiteer, pick a war, any war lately, there's big money behind it and who's crap fiat money remains on top. Ideology and assorted claptrap is way down the list of actual causes of war, although the manipulators push that stuff heavy to keep their serfs inline. Witness iraq and S. Hussein-no one gave much of a crap until he switched to using euros instead of the greenback for his oil sales, WHAMMO, gotta go invade! Even in gulf war 1, they didn't care much about him retaking kuwait, which was historically a province of iraq going way back (he had a legit point with them slant drilling under the border and stealing his oil actually)-until he looted the kuwaiti central bank and absconded with the gold and greenbacks stashed there. THEN they had to go emergency mode and kick him back out, etc.
Always follow the money when it comes to wars and threats of wars. I'm not saying it is 100% of the reason, but I'd put it in the high 90s at a minimum.
personal EMP device...the time is right, the market is there...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Your definition of "winning" is too limited.
It factors only the short term perceived gain and a "battle vs. war" view.
The long term damage of your getting involved in a fight is brushed over too.
For example, the current USA "wars" in Afghanistan and Iraq: there are lots of damage done to the USA:
- Alienating the rest of the world.
- Losing allies in Europe and elsewhere.
- Killing tens of thousands of civilians.
- Creating more terrorists.
- Destabilizing the oil supply, and increasing oil prices.
- Not even capturing Bin Laden so far.
- Weakening international institutions (UN).
- Setting a precedence for unilateral war, and indirectly encouraging others to do so in the future.
- Focusing on the Muslim lands as a perceived present enemy, while ignoring larger potential long term rivals/threats (e.g. China).
- Being in deep debt for the cost of the war.
All these things will catch up with the USA sooner or later. At that time, "winning" will not sound that great.
Just look at history and empires and see that they all fell. More often it is a fizzle rather than a bang. More often it is like an old person getting weaker and weaker. Look at Britain at the end of the 19th century and how in a few decades it ceased to become the Kingdom where the sun never sets.
One trait in empires is that they never listen to the lessons of history, and they are doomed to repeat the mistakes.
'Guided' missiles are a good example. Landmines are machines that kill without command from a human. Autonomous killing machines are very convenient. If you don't want to risk harm to your own soldiers, they're great! If you want to avoid criticism or legal action from closer to home, they're great - there's a smoking gun, but nobody was holding it.
Asimov's laws were great for stories, because they weren't laws, they were more like 'morals' for robots. As far as I remember, the Laws were never externally imposed, resulting in punishments for the robots. I thought the whole point of those stories was to illustrate how an apparently workable set of internal rules could lead to all sorts of undesirable behaviour.
It's futile to search for an internal law to make robots safe. It doesn't work for humans, won't work for robots.
Not even kidding. CIWS is a 20mm Gatling gun with in integrated radar/FLIR and fire control computer. You can literally flip the switch and it will kill anything moving within 10,000 yards. An ex-CIWS tech posted someplace that the tracking system is so good that it tends to get extraordinarily aggravated by flocks of seagulls. It has to be locked down in port so it doesn't get angry at them.
Some videos of the CIWS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDWH1CHNOw4
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Any robot loyal to side "A" can be hacked and taken over by side "B".
Mr. president, you are a threat to humanity. Prepare to die...
I can't find a reference offhand, but months ago there were reports (and videos) showing a Korean automated turret, capable of using motion tracking to identify something human-sized and moving. A quick YouTube search shows the possibility of sonar-based targeting as well. This experiment shows some ability to identify people and cars in a street scene. So, the technology seems to be just about ready for automatic targeting of humans, if anyone's willing to use it.
Of course the things should have a shutdown code, but we need to use them against human opponents. For political reasons we've become appalled by the thought of human soldiers dying in war, so if we're to fight at all, we need proxies.
Revive the Constitution.
The Three Laws in Asimov's work involved robots who were close to human, and could weigh alternatives. The most powerful and most human, even superhuman robot (Daneel Olivaw IIRC) created a zeroeth law based on sheer altruism.
To attempt to apply these same laws to current machinery is sweet, even cute but somewhere they will I think end up being interpreted by humans and converted into either simplified "rules of engagement" limited to simplified logic and sensors, or simply into battle commands (i.e. the robotic system itself having no knowledge of rules constraining its behavior). It is also hard to make battlefield decisions even for humans, if I understand it well enough. For example there is the civilian flight that got shot down by an Aegis ship a few years ago. Rules of engagement will just allow predefined game logic to be inserted into systems so they can replay those rules faster than a human, but the computer won't be worrying about lives and hesitating, so the rules may even end up being nicer than a human commander might be.
Discussing the laws is not without merit, however it is a given that enemy forces will seek to subvert any technical application of them, for example placing "I am a human" IFF transmitters on weapons platforms, etc.
I believe there are semiautonomous weaponed robots in the North Korean DMZ, or there will be soon; I remember reading somewhere about that and seeing a photo or video (in the popular press/web). Basically the robot can identify and track at high speed movement of enemy personnel through foliage, home in on them and call for surrender and shoot. In fact it is not clear at all that a human is involved in this sequence, and certainly if you had such a system with a bunch of people attacking you the first thing you would do is tell it where you are and then to shoot everything else without compunction.
Laws of behavior may be more useful for forcing manufacturers not in defense to over-design safety into the system, to the extent that a minimal amount of intelligence might operate to keep the human safe even in situations that hadn't been forseen.
I'm skeptical about such laws being brought into defense because it would seem their first applications would be in 1) disabling weapons so they don't fire when they should, because a friendly might be in its range, which could in fact get the weapon owner killed, and 2) in passing judgements on command decisions made in the field or by generals outside the field. In other words the laws will be accepted as a gauge of ethics and even without requiring circuitry they can be applied to grade a commander or troop on its decision-making.
Probably the only useful part would be in putting them in some form into real autonomous killer robots that are being used now and in the future, so as to not kill unless forced to do so. It requires the robots to discount their own survivability but presumably a robot that does not love life is not hard to manufacture.
Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize.
This was all covered in Isaac Asimov's excellent short story: "Little Lost Robot", which appeared in 1947
"War is Hell"
Ever read All Quiet on the Western Front? Ever talked to someone who was there or a civilian in European WWII?
War sucks. It's supposed to suck. Without the pain and suffering that war can bring to all sides of the battle, winners and losers alike. Perhaps the generals should go watch Star Trek Episode 23, A Taste of Armageddon, circa 1967.
That society has done such a nice job making war "clean" that they have decided to continue fighting a war for 500 years rather than just figure out how to make peace.
In most societies, people are taught that violence against others is fundamentally bad. This becomes a moral element that entwines all the people within that society. It also motivates the same people to find ways around doing violence.
If you study anything about the Nazi camps in WWII they had a growing behaviour where the soldiers in the concentration camps knew what they were doing but absolved themselves of any responsibility by hiding behind the statement, "I was just following orders", thereby removing themselves morally from the actitivies. After WWII this was considered to be a War Crime and has been backed by hundreds of trials across the world.
Fast forward 60 years and we are at a point where the soldiers who are operating a computer screen which operates these killer robots can absolve themselves from any responsibility of moral involvement because the Laws will simply allow them to say, I was just operating a computer program. And while this is going on, there is no one left to come back from the battlefield to serve as a reminder of just how bad war really is and how important it is to avoid it.
At the same time if we are going to commit to a war, we had better be willing to do it to completion even when it gets ugly. I'm pretty pissed at the news for giving us daily body counts of 4 and 10 soldiers on a 5 year battle. In contrast, WWII was hundreds to thousands a day and everyone was sticking to their plan. Everyone was commited to the plan and everyone knew why they were fighting. Vietnam wasn't so clear cut. It was rather vague as to why were where there and even on day one, not everyone was convinced we needed that war. And now we are in the Middle East without a convincing and clear cut plan as to what we are doing, why we are there, what we hope to accomplish, and not enough people in the States give a shit. Perhaps in New York City, but no where else.
They'll get their killer robots and their legal loopholes to kill anything they want and no one will really do much because it's clean and doesn't interfere with "Dancing with the Stars" and the sheep continue to bleat
So the idea is we're going to secure the streets of Baghdad by using killer bushmobiles? Cool! Americans love an underdog, and there's nothing like a feisty little robot to twang at the old heartstrings.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Certain higher caliber, man-portable weapons fall into a similar category of legally only targeting materiel instead of personnel. .50 cal and maybe some smaller sniper weapons, the kind you see on "Future Weapons" punching through inch-thick steel plates, are supposed to be used for shooting out gunsights on tanks, disabling emplaced weapons and destroying radar/electronics hardware. For similar reasons to legal limits on the types of ammo soldiers can use (no AP, willie-pete, dum-dum, etc), these heavier rifles are not supposed to be used on other soldiers. So, what does a young sniper-scout report? "Sir, I was shooting at a government-issue canteen. The soldier just happened to be drinking out of it."
On robot weapons, I highly recommend Manuel Delanda's book "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines" It is dense and from the early 90s, but lays a good groundwork for what is happening now.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
My Killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available.
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
If one wants to believe in things like justice, one should accept the existence of some global laws.
When I posted about terrorist style warfare, I meant war than doesn't observe laws. Sure we want "clean" war, because we have something to lose. A group that produces suicide bombers doesn't have anything to lose by ignoring the "laws of warfare" but they know they can't win if they obey them. The only way they can win is if they make the war so incredibly horrific that we choose to leave. That is done by hiding in the civilian population making us kill more civilians than we find acceptable; or framing innocents as terrorists making us suspect and interrogate innocent people; or any other attack that degrades our way of life and our view of ourselves, until we can bear no more.
We are all just people.
You are with the right rules lawyer and the correct circumstances...
.50BMG may be deployed for penetrating cover and destroying equipment such as vehicles; but it's still a machine gun and legal to use against enemy combatants, especially if it's what the troops have available.
The best I can think of is a target that you have open, twisty holes to, but are protected from most HE effects to to depth underground, but the area involved is not conductive to bunker-busters (IE a cave network).
Still in most of those circumstances thermobaric rounds are used today. It's quicker, though I understand the main cause of death is asphixiation.
If a weapon is the most effective at the situation you've got; or even the average most effective at a number of ranges; it's pretty much allowed. If a weapon is nastier but not actually more effective; then you have a case under the suffering clause.
The M2
I don't read AC A human right
I don't think you disproved my rather simplistic example. Trying to be philosophic I could say no object can occupy the space of another, but that's not the whole point. Moving freely always leaves footsteps and trampled grass at the very least and vast herds of moving people usually destroy much more in their path.
I didn't say anything about trashing the garden, but it's revealing how you equate moving in herds with destruction in the process. Because that's what usually happens. But assume me and my 300 hypothetical relatives move without footsteps, we don't litter and we don't release bodily waste while we are around.
But nonetheless you would have to deal with 300 people camping around in your garden. Sure, we're tiptoeing around the flowers and remain awkwardly quiet, but hey, we're still occupying your garden. You could also move around freely, maybe occupying MY garden or that of another. But I for one don't have one, every weekend I camp out at someone else's garden.
What now? My hypothetical human hordes don't displace anyone (if you like a place on your favorite bench facing the prized roses, we'll make room for you), don't damage anything (we don't litter, we don't waste and we don't make noise) - but we're still around you. And we're a goddamn ugly sight.
How long would you endure our "visit"?
Will the laws apply when the nanabots dissolve everyone on the planet's surface and re-assemble them into robots which are indistiguishable from a regular human?
Doing battle with visible robots sounds like as fun a sport as outdated conventional warfare.
I have seen lots of people state that the use of 50 Cal Bullets used in the BMG and the M-107 vs. personnel is against the Geneva Convention, but I have also seen people say that this is a myth. I did some quick searching on this and was unable to find a reputable source that quote the actual part of the convention that would ban the use of these rounds vs. personnel. Can anyone actually site the part? Personally I doubt it's true since the BMG is mounted on lots of HMMWVs and it seems to me that it is used vs. personnel all the time. If it was against the convention to use these rounds against personnel I would guess most would have M-249s or M-240s mounted on them instead. Thanks for anyone who can actually put this to bed for me. Joe
Let's just sidestep the killer robot problem entirely by not building killer robots. Tada.
I don't understand this or think its at all fair. We should not be imposing rules on the poor kill droids that are contrary to their nature. A kill droid so be free to romp and do what it does best kill anything and everything.
Honestly this strikes me like thoes people who adopt dogs that are prone to barking and then put collars on them to shock them when they do it. Its unfair I say, and worng to force something to act contrary to its nature. If you don't want a dog that barks much you should adopt a bread which is not given to barking or maybe just get a cat.
The same is true for robots. If you don't want a robot that runs around killing everything it detects especially you then you should forgo adopting or building a kill droid. Maybe go get yourself one of thoes more friendly industrial breads that enjoys welding steel pannels onto cars or if space is a concern some types of robots are very small and even enjoy roaming around your home vacuming the floor for you as they do. There is an appropriate type of robot for almost ever situation. Please be responsible and only adopt a kill droid if you have adequate supplies of victims for it to kill.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
John Connor
If you stay arm's length, I don't see a problem. I would probably disparage your disrespect and try to shame you into giving me some space. If you're such an ugly sight, I doubt you could stand each other for long either. Anyway, it doesn't make much sense to assume the lack of arbitrary political borders would provoke everybody to live on top of each other. Don't believe for a second that they exist for your benefit. They exist to impoverish and enslave, by creating economic disparity and arbitrary restriction of movement to escape the enforced impoverishment. Any other excuse you hear is a bunch of hogwash spewed by those with economic and/or political ambitions. It's about power, and sex, lots of nasty, perverted, dirty, little...Well, that's the idea anyway.
What?
Enough sniping; on to the meat of the article. And the most obvious flaw already pointed out is that nigh-all combat platforms are combination of weapon, man, and (often) motive vehicle. So, the robot could cheerfully waste a tank as a "thing", with the crew as acceptable collateral damage. As a legal manoeuvre, this might have some merit, but I don't think it satisfies as a philosophical sucessor to Asimov. [I leave aside the article asking us to believe that non-lethal weapons will persuade the enemy to abandon their fighting platforms so they can be clinically destroyed by the robot. Nice. I have to put up with a lot of silly techno-utopianism with the American way of war but this makes me wonder if the author has slept through every conflict since ALLIED FORCE.]
Amusingly though, on the most restrictive reading of the rules, the US robts will be sat on the battlefield waiting for other robots to be fielded by the enemy so that they can shoot them. I'm reminded of the Onion article where the US pledges $600m to the Taliban to build a C4I complex so that they can bomb it. In practise , of course, it matters not what rules the US and its allies adopt in the short term. The temptation for a challenger power to adopt a universal targetting ROE for _their_ robots would be immense. Faced with such a challenge, I suspect US robots would have to follow suit, at risk of ceding a massive advantage on the battlefield. [This is already the case with the argument for arming UAV's for air-to-air engagement. Fear of what enemy UAVs so prepared might potentially do is already influencing doctrine development; without one real theat in the sky].
As with warfare through the ages, technological possibility will shape strategy, with challengers being first adopters (the current RMA is a bit unusual in this). And after a while, I think people will find that the law follows too... there's this old chestnut about crossbows and knights...
I find the expressed need to create different laws of robotics for war robots to be a form of denial. The original point of the robotic laws was that robots should not be harming humans... The desire to change the laws to make robots harming humans OK, denies the original intent. If we decide that autonomous weapon systems may harm humans, maybe we should not complain when software doesn't work as predicted and they turn on us. At least when humans are in the loop, there is a chance that ethical and moral concepts may come into play and moderate the decision to perform violence. I say leave the original laws as they are. Maybe it is ok for robots to fight robots. People wiser than I should debate that.
No no no, you loopy brothel inmate ! come on guys this isn't a good thing please control your polotitons !
When I was in the Army Armor Corps., we were told that while turning a .50 caliber M2 machine gun on enemy troops would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions, shooting equipment that just happened to be carried by a troop was acceptable, even if it resulted in the death of the troop. Of course, to the troop involved it would probably make little difference if they were shot to death with an anti-personnel-rated 7.62 coax, the TC's .50 cal, or an unusually accurate HEAT round.
-- Let him who is without spelling error ignite the first flame --
It's worse than premature, it's utter fantasy. We might as well be discussing which Harry Potter spells would be appropriate in a combat situation like Iraq. We could argue about whether we should be allowed to use the jelly legs hex to restrain insurgents, but counterpoint that with not using the Cruciatus Curse in order to torture them for information. The Three Laws of Robotics are just as relevant as *these* pressing political questions.
You can use two definition for nuclear war : a war in which one side or both side use a nuclear waepon. In such case WW2 was a nuclear war. You can use the definition of nuclear war=war where both side use nuclear weapon. In such case WW2 was NOT a nuclear war, and most people usually agree on the second definition, NOT the first.
:I won't dwelve either too much in the debat that at that point the war was already WON, it was only a matter of month, if not week before japan surrender, and if the US had searched a way to allow japan to save face, the massacre of the civilian through the atom bomb would have been avoided. Butthen again they were probably only seen as "collateral damage" jsut like Iraki were seen as collateral damage. Now my opinion is that civilian killing are unjustified no matter the side (London, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagazaki). The army are there to kill each other. As soon as they turn over killing civilian, then a step ("massacre") is taken which should never be taken.
About WW2
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It is deeply sad and disheartening how easy it is to shrug off the human suffering caused by this kind of mentality with words like 'collateral damage' and 'In the real world the only law is to win'.
o gist) books about psychopathy - the mentality that pervades American business and politics seems to correspond very well with the definition of the psychopath. Is this what we want: An America that is the 'psychopath' of the world?
No, in the real world cooperation wins the day - a caring and supportive society will always be stronger in the long run than the anarchy of 'the strongest takes what he wants'. Try and read Dr. Hare's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hare_(psychol
IE, we are fully capable of building robots that control themselves in order to carry out this task.
I'm pretty sure IE did it by making people want to stab themselves in the face. Brilliantly simple, really.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I happen to know that every killbot has a preset kill limit. If they attack, we can just send wave after wave of humans after them until they shut down!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Most commenters are missing the point. These are not rules for robots. They're rules for people making robots.
But either way, the only way to really win the game is not to play at all, of course.