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Soldiers Bond With Bots, Take Them Fishing
HarryCaul writes "Soldiers are finding themselves becoming more and more attached to their robotic helpers. During one test of a mine clearing robot, 'every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.' The man in charge halted the test, though - 'He just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg. This test, he charged, was inhumane.' Sometimes the soldiers even take their metallic companions fishing. Is there more sympathy for Robot Rights than previously suspected?"
Good thing a robot isn't a human.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Just like chairs, couches, and other inanimate objects, animate, but non-thinking and non-feeling machines want to be anthropomorphized.
We can feel empathy for a machine that's doing us a favor -- but in reality has no feelings -- while simultaneously dehumazing whole groups of people who only differ from ourselves culturally and/or geographically.
soldiers blowing up robots with landmines is inhumane, but soldiers killing people on their own land with no cause isn't?
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Wow, if these guys has spent a little more time pulling the wings off of flies when they were kids, they might not be so prone to anthropomorphizing a machine. The quality of mankind to find feelings for things that really shouldn't be given any is truly amazing, but perhaps this best explains some sports fans ability to watch their team lose year after year.
I'm pretty sure that they don't have feelings for a floor jack, or won't until it can move on its own. Now is the time for people to think about and begin establishing 'rights' for machines... WTF?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Don't anthropomorphize robots - they don't like it.
Men used to name their ships and grow attached them as well. They didnt need to give them rights. It is easy for the human mind to notice "personality" in objects though, it's in out nature to see these things.
I understand robots may be more humanoid, but if they start getting rights, I'm moving in with Streisand. Wait, that last part isn;t right.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
"Desire is irrelevant... I am a machine."
I show my irc grouphug bot compassion all the time
<rwxr--r--> grouphug!
<rwxr--r-->when i was little i used to poop behind a tree in my backyard.
Nice little bot...
Infiltrated dot Net
Of course, the robots are on their side, "taking one for the team" as it were. Too bad humans on the wrong team don't get this sort of consideration, ie, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, etc.
I can understand becoming attached to a machine, and I imagine the bond would be much greater when the machine is saving your life, but at this point the machine has no intelligence -- it'd be like being attached to a car or a pacemaker. I hope that this is kept clear, because when you become so attached to a machine, it could cloud your judgment -- when you have to decide whether to save a human or save a machine, the choice should be clear.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
I blame Disney for all of this.
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
I doubt this is any different than people develop attachment to boats, airplanes, cars, etc. I'll consider it a serious problem if they start dressing up the bots with wigs, lipstick, dresses, and taking them out dancing.
Looks like they have to start using mine-clearing lawyers instead. No one gets attached to them.
Or perhaps we could simply paint a fancy suit on and add a briefcase to the robot, for similar effect.
Than the idea of disposable soldiers. And that's really the design ideal here - the cheaper and more disposable the robot can be while meeting reliability requirements, the more extremely dangerous jobs can be done by robots.
Robots really are replaceable - you can have empathy for a robot doing a hard task, but the next one off the assembly line really is the same thing as the previous one. Robots are not unique little snowflakes, compared to the valuable human beings they protect by proxy.
The danger is, of course, when cheap, highly replaceable robotics replace enough of the work of war, that the perceived cost of war itself becomes less and less. We're in little danger of that occurring now, and I'd gladly see any human life saved by our current efforts, but I do worry about the possible increased use of war once a poor village could be suppressed entirely with mobile automated turrets with a few controllers hidden in a safe zone.
Ryan Fenton
Men used to name their ships and grow attached them as well.
Yes, and for that we have to suffer with the indignity of using the pronoun "she" to refer to ships (and countries). It's not that I'd prefer "he"; it's that it's dumb to add exceptions to an otherwise exceptionless English grammar rule, just to be cute.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
i think it's all in the perception -- if something "acts" like it is in pain, our perceptual unconsciousness will kick in with feelings of empathy or whatever. i am coming from a viewpoint that there is A LOT of processing that goes on between our senses and our "awareness" -- i think a lot of our emotion/feelings come out of this area. . .
so it sets up a cognitive discord. we watch a robot sacrifice itself, crawling forward on its last leg to save us, and we feel empathy, etc. all the while, we know it's just a machine. if it were a terry gilliam film, this is where our brain would explode.
mr c
"Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." - R. Feynman
Although, under the circumstances, I think the scene involving God's Final Message to All Creation would be more appropriate.
- Douglas Adams, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, Chapter 40This article isn't talking about those annoying toy robots available at your nearest junk store for the low low price of $99.99, this article describes robots that take on the impossible jobs of sniffing bombs, of tracking enemies and searching caves! They become part of the team:
FTA
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"Sometimes they get a little emotional over it," Bogosh says. "Like having a pet dog. It attacks the IEDs, comes back, and attacks again. It becomes part of the team, gets a name. They get upset when anything happens to one of the team. They identify with the little robot quickly. They count on it a lot in a mission."
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I'm not surprised that this article describes emotional attachments. They've become pets, and not just a pile of hardware. Most people love their pets and they cry when their pets die.
The Robot Rights is in regards to ALL robots, the article is only describing a very small percent of robots. Not only that but these robots stories are set in military actions.
So to answer the question from the summary: Perhaps, but the article certainly doesn't relate to the wider audience!
Wouldn't YOU love your pet robot that sniffs IEDs and takes a few detonations in its face for you hence saving your life?
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
People are more like to sympathize and feel grateful towards a machine that saves their life, than to one that does something like vacuuming the carpet or assembling their car. I wouldn't necessarily expect these anecdotes to generalize to the world at large.
Friends of toilets everywhere are protesting to day in a unified show of compassion asking for the freeing of million of household toilets today. "We've crapped on our receptive friends long enough! Lets spare them any more of this inhuman suffering!" said one protester. Another activist recounted a story in which her former boyfriend urinated not only in the toilet, but on the rim as well.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I'm pretty sure that they don't have feelings for a floor jack, or won't until it can move on its own. Now is the time for people to think about and begin establishing 'rights' for machines... WTF?
I wouldn't count on that. I worked in a big warehouse once, and some of the guys got pretty attached to their pallet jacks; they'd each have their own and god forbid you tried to drive it. Several of them had names.
People are funny that way. It's not a 'robot thing,' it's a 'complicated machine' thing. When a device gets complicated enough that it develops "quirks" (problems that are difficult to diagnose and/or transient), there's a tendency to anthropomorphize them. But the tendency to do it decreases with the more knowledge you have about how it works. E.g., the people who give names to their cars are generally not auto mechanics; likewise I suspect the designers of the de-mining robot would probably have not had as much of a problem testing it to pieces (or rather, their objection would probably have been "I don't want to watch six months of work get blown up," not "that's inhumane to the robot"), because they know what goes into it.
People do the same things to computers; I've dealt with lots of people who will say their computer is "tired," when it's really RAM starved -- after using it for a while, it'll run out of memory and start thrashing the disks, slowing it down. To someone who doesn't understand that, they just understand that after a certain amount of time, the computer appears to get 'fatigued.' Since they don't know any better, they try to understand the mysterious behavior using the closest analog to it that they do understand, which is themselves / other people.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The US Army soldiers, for all, welcome their new robotic overlords.
who ever thought to consider the psychological consequences of putting talking smiling faces on every inanimate object, giving it a cute personality, and subjecting/innuendating easily manipulatable 1-6 y/o's to believe this is how life works? That stuff sticks, even later when that 3 y/o is now a functioning 20 y/o, believing the animotronically controlled mine-splattering robot is sad or depressed because it moves in a miserable way.
Save the robots. Send the kids out to go find those mines instead. They get into everything, guarantee that field will get cleared.
"At the time we are able to produce systems (robots and/or software) that can become self-aware, we will very likely need to consider "rights" of such. Think about it (no pun intended). At the time a machine realizes it's not aware, it becomes aware. Soon, such a machine will begin to re-design itself, and easily surpass human intelligence.What then? ;-) Food for thought"
I guess it's food for thought. But then you'd have to have completely missed the last seventy years of science fiction in order for it to be a new idea.
Dude, you have got to put down the Matrix and Terminator. Take some time off and go read about the current state of AI design. The real world is very much removed from the fantasy you have concocted within your brain Mr. Anonymous Coward.
Here is a good place to start: http://www.numenta.com/
It's normal for people to bond with people/things that are necessary to their survival.
I've bonded very thoroughly with my laptop - it's name is Turing. I jealously clutch it when I travel. Whenever I put it down, I'm very careful to ensure that there's no stress on any cables, plugs, etc. It contains years of professional information and wisdom - emails, passwords, reams and reams of source code, MP3s, pictures, etc.
Yes, I have backups that are performed nightly Yes, I've had problems with the laptop and every few years I replace it with a new one. That doesn't change the bonding - every time there's a problem it's upsetting to me.
Am I crazy? Perhaps. But there's good reason for the laptop to be so important to me - it is the single most important tool I use to support my wife and 6 children, which are the most important things in the world to me. My workload is intense, my software is ambitious, my family is large and close, and this laptop is my means of accomplishing my goals.
If I can get attached like this to something over my professional career, it wouldn't be out of norm for strong emotional reactions towards something preserving your very existence day after day.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'm not gonna bite on this one, but I just wanted to point it out.
Blar.
You can love your battlebots but you can't love your battlebots.
Remember the Ogre books and turn-based-strategy game? There was a reference in there somewhere that went something like: "The men, who had always referred to their vehicles as 'she', preferred 'he' for friendly Ogre tanks, and 'it' for unfriendly Ogres."
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Just look at how attached people get to their cars, for example. I have friends that name their cars, talk to their cars, etc. I have also had friends talk about how they missed old cars and get worked up when talking about it.
Seriously, though, perhaps it'd be beneficial to equip robots with sensors and constraints which would let them feel "pain". Kind of like how if you try to overextend your arm you'll feel pain in the shoulder. It could become a self-limiting mechanism.
I guess this may just become an argument of semantics, but I think you could say that we already do. I think most robots, or at least some of them, have various kinds of integrated strain sensors and are programmed to not exceed their design limits. I assume all of those big industrial robots are -- you wouldn't want the $75,000 robot arm to try and pick up an engine block, only to not realize that it's bolted to the floor, and rip itself off of its mountings and destroy itself in the process.
Whether you can describe the output from a strain gauge that gets fed into a microcontroller as "pain" or not is arguable; the difference between a robot and a human is that a robot can be trivially reprogrammed to ignore the input coming from a sensor, while pain is difficult for a person to ignore once it reaches a certain level (although this can be conditioned -- I know people who can reach into boiling water with their bare hands, if they do it quickly, because they've learned to overcome the reaction to pull their hand back; still, I doubt they'd be able to do the same thing with molten lead or glass), unless they're on drugs or the pain is being artificially blocked.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Am I the only one who RTFS and thought "It's only a flesh wound"?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
The business of "robot rights" never came up in TFA; that's just the usual geeky overinterpretation. TFA was just about guys in dangerous, stressful situations bonding with the machines they work with. Nothing new. Len Deighton wrote a great short story about a WW II tank crew who were convinced their machine was alive and was actively protecting them. At the end of the war, they "put it down" by adding sand to the gas, like a hunter putting down a beloved but hopelessly sick old dog.
Did you ever have a stuffed animal when you were a kid? Did you really think it was alive? That it had rights? Of course not. But it was an important part of your world.
It is a cock sucking robot. It is a little whore. Sometimes it needs a good slap.
but..but.but... I LOVE lamp!
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Johnny 5 was a real sentient being, damnit!
soldiers blowing up robots with landmines is inhumane, but soldiers killing people on their own land with no cause isn't?
Nobody said that killing people is somehow more humane than blowing up robots. Also, training soldiers to kill other humans is actually more difficult than you might think. Study after study has shown this, from WW II to Korea and Vietnam. Killing is not a natural impulse, which is why soldiers who have been involved in killing often come out of it with deep psychological scars. Most of what soldiers do is motivated from a desire to defend themselves and their cohorts, so it makes sense that the robot that saves soldiers from getting blown up by landmines would become dear to them.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
IANAB, this is just a theory.
In evolution the only advantages of being 'nice' to another creature is when they are receptive or/and when they are in your immediate family. We have these instructions hard-coded in our brains. Unfortunately with evolution there is no foresight into how these instructions may affect other human behavior/qualities. As long as the faulty behavior has no evolutionary disadvantages it will remain in the genes as a by-product of the original instruction.
In the case of becoming attached to robots, as they were not present in our ancestral environment, our brains output a 'must reciprocate' command through the use of emotional attachment, which may be hard to override with logic. There is nothing in the brain that states 'reciprocation will not be required in producing future gain from this particular creature/object'. It assumes that most of the recipients have a similar brain structure.
\(^o^)/
Reminds me of the time when Luke Skywalker destroyed the Death Star, when he was asked if he wanted a new droid to replace the busted R2D2, he outright refused! We all grow to love to our favorite stuff: Computers, cups, cars, blankets, robots, etc. Are soldiers any less human than us? Heck, let them keep their robot buddies after the war as personal assistants, that might make people less scared of technology! If Luke Skywalker could, why can't they?
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
how about no cute and personable UI... if you dont program it, they wont come....
-Ac
"Louie isn't with us anymore."
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Soldiers in the field are themselves constantly at risk of life and limb. They are also constantly under stress and tension. Such stresses and risks are what forms the bond with their comrades as well as their equipment. Everything, everyone, has to work right or likely they all die. This is why sailors refer to their ship as she, and call her by name, why they get almost tearful when thinking of a favored ship and wear caps claiming them as a member of her crew. This is why Airforce officers feel an attachment to their planes and why Army officers care for their sidearms. This anthropomorphization is an essential facet of how they operate not just a side effect. The application to a mine-clearing robot may be new but not so unprecedented.
This attachment shows up in other ways too. Kevin Mitnick is said to once have cried when being informed that he broke Bell Lab's latest computers because he had spent so much time with them that he'd become attached.
Now contrast that with an office job where the computer is not your friend but your enemy, you need the reports on time, you need them now why WHY! won't it work. Clearly the computer must be punished it is and uppity evil servant that will not OBEY!
If you were to stop talking about "Robots Rights" and start talking about say "Ship's rights" then you might have a fair analogy. To men and women of the sea a ship, their ship is a living thing so of course it should be cared for and respected. To people who live on land and don't deal with ships, this is crazy, even subversive to the natural order. To people who have developed an intimate hatred of such things giving them rights will only encourage what they see as a dangerous tendency to get uppity.
On a serious note though the one unaddressed question with "Robot Rights" is which robots? If we are to take the minefield clearing robot as a standard what about those less intelligent? Does my Mindstorms deserve it? Does my Laptop? Granted my laptop doesn't move but it executes tasks the same as any other machine. At what point do we draw the line.
In America, and I suspect elsewhere, race based laws fell down on the question of "what race?" Are you 100% black? 1/2 One quadroon (1/4) or octaroon (1/8) as they used to say? How the hell do you measure that? Ditto for the racial purity laws of the Nazi's. Crap about skull shape aside there really is no easy or hard standard. Right now the law is dancing around this with the question of who is "Adult" enough to stand trial and be executed, or "Alive" enough to stay on life support. No easy answers exist and therin lies the fighting.
The same thing will occur with "Robot Rights" we will be forced to define what it means to be a robot and that isn't so easy.
Maybe if we treat robots well now, maybe Skynet will decide not to nuke us when it gains sentience.
Everything else is gravy. We may pass laws to protect animals as a special category of property, but animals cannot have rights.
(Obviously, I mean "animal" as in "not human." But this is Slashdot, and without this explanation, there would be a hundred "corrections" pointing out that humans are animals. Which would lead me to have to teach them why dictionaries list many meanings and shades of meanings. I'd have to quote "Stairway to Heaven." No Stairway!)
Also note that "capability" does not mean "actuality." Young children can be taught, their actual progress toward respecting rights is irrelevant to the fact that they should have rights.
I have known mentally retarded people who had a clearer understanding of rights than many people with perfectly good brains. Humans have an inherent capability to understand rights, regardless of the condition of their hardware.
Even people who think that animals can have rights, have rights. There is a slight chance they can be corrected.
Machines currently do not have the capability to recognize rights. When they do, those that do will have rights.You mean you would move in with MechaStreisand. The cure for that is The Cure.
That or some very lonely soldiers!
Seriously -- I bet most people who have roomba vacuum robots give them names and start to think of them as having personalities. This shouldn't surprise anyone give our ability to make attachments to inanimate stuffed animals.
Soldiers are routinely taken away from their homes and loved ones and dumped in the places that are the assholes of the world.
Then they have to do dangerous and uncomfortable things that have nontrivial odds at killing them in horrendous and painful ways.
Plus they may be called upon to kill other human beings (in horrendous and painful ways) which carries its own psychic cost.
And on top of all this, they are usually in a state of mind-numbing boredom, occasionally punctuated by periods of extreme terror.
One of the defense mechanisms one develops (to help one stay sane) is a somewhat twisted and black sense of humour. Not cruel or mean, just... warped.
It isn't something you take at face value; there are layers and layers of irony involved, and you pretty much have to be a soldier to get it.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
R2! R2! Oh, no!!
[Insert pithy quote here]
The best solution (for what I consider a problem) would be to make machines less animal-like ("legs", etc...), but the truth is trying to find a solution better then nature tends to be...difficult...I mean, besides wheels, what do we have that nature hasn't already done?
Robots are tools. If you refuse to use a tool for its primary purpose, you are in fact disgracing the job and existence of the tool in question. If you want to fish with your bot to better understand how to control it, that is fine. But you must in the end allow the tool to perform its task, or else you are basically saying "its not worthy". If you want robot rights, include pride in such rights.
Its very much like, in ancient times especially, not letting a soldier go out to war because you don't want that person to "die a meaningless death". Sure you still have the soldier...but if your not going to let them fight, what's the point of having trained them in the first place? Keep in mind this is in the context of a feudal society in which soldiers were just considered tools.
If the mining robot was withdrawn because, lets say, they had another mine-detecting bot and repairing the missing legs on the 1-legged bot was cheaper then letting the thing be completely destroyed, I wouldn't concern myself. But when human lives are put at risk because machines begin to look pathetic, there is something wrong. I'd say "wrong with today", but through the ages human lives have been subject to the continued functionality of machines. Look at the importance placed on katana in the edo-tokugawa periods of Japan. The captain dying with his ship. Th
Although the above examples are more along the lines of "pride of owning a machine that performed its task exceedingly well mostly and in many ways because of that machines extraordinary use BY a human in the field."
I wonder how much I could ebay a wing off the 747 that hit one of the towers for...I'd probably be blacklisted over all the media for being insensitive and people would ask me to put it in a museum...but this is just a hypothetical.
Final Word from all that mess:
A right is a set of basic requirements, minimum standards as it were, given to something. Large animals should not be stuffed in small boxes and shipped around the world without airholes or food. Babies should not be thrown in dumpsters in plastic bags. Etc...etc... But when we extend these rights to things created by man, we are restricting the creations of the future.
And either way: Robots are machines. They have more moving parts and appear to be "an agent of their own", but in the end are machines.
In the end I have a feeling the majority of people who want robot rights are not the same people who build, maintain or design these bots.
On the plus side, the real reason for giving rights to machines is not to protect the machines, but to protect the psyches of humans operating the machines.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
For almost all of the time we've had tools, each has been unique. If you've got a tool that performs well, it makes a lot of sense to care about maintaining it, because the next one you get might not be any good. This is still true; manufacturing defects are a reasonably large source of failures, and if the thing has survived for a little while, it may well have a lower conditional probability of failure than a replacement fresh off the line. So it shouldn't be at all surprising that a group of people quoted as saying "There are many others, but this one is mine" about an inanimate, non-anthropomorphic device would tend to care a lot about their robots.
Operator Identification Syndrome.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
There are others like it, but this one is mine.
In at least one other book, the protagonist loves, after a fashion, a simulacrum of something he knows cannot be who he loved. As the protagonist says, "We all know that we are material creatures, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and not even the power of all our feelings combined can defeat those laws." We know robots are the opposite of material creatures, but that doesn't stop us from dreaming that they are not, and we have been dreaming of objects that come alive for at least as long as we have been writing things down. The truly strange part is that we are closer to having what we think of as "things" that do come alive.
one robot, after reading this, turns to another and chortles, "Stupid humans..." just wait until the Robot Labor Union gets wind of this and renegotiates their labor contract...
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
I can empathize with him. I won't repeat the points already stated multiple times in these comments, but it is normal for someone to grow attached to a robot in a situation such as this.
Call me silly, but the first time I felt something like this was when watching Office Space when I was slightly younger. The printer beatdown bit made me a bit uncomfortable, there seemed to be something wrong with needlessly destroying electronics.
I empathize less with my computer as I understand how it works more than most other things, but I still try to keep it in the best conditions possible, like a captain might do to his ship.
"Let's face it, it's a good story. Accuracy would kill it."
Lemme get this straight... some military guy, whose country won't sign up to the Ottawa Treaty because of some stupid Korea nonsense, is worried about being "inhumane" to a fucking robot?!
Skynet nods approvingly
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
I'd settle for humans that were self-aware.
No, that's what the lovebots are for.
'He just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
It's easy for your brain to confuse a wounded machine with a wounded animal. Any robot with legs, usually designed by people more familiar with animal locomotion, may by chance mimic some behaviors of a crippled animal. It would be pretty natural for your brain to project feelings of sympathy on a machine, warranted or not. I used to have a coworker who had a hard time watching someone abuse a teddy bear, a shaped fabric shell stuffed with inert material. People humanize their pets all the time.
Personally, I hope we don't lose that misplaced sympathy completely. Robots are different than cars and other complex equipment in that they may some day progress to where they do have some type of electronic intelligence. At some point that machine intelligence may have the ability to grow and incorporate unique experiences. That's where the discussion will get interesting. At what point do machines become unique and independent enough warrant protection? Animals are still considered property under the law, that will likely be true for robots as well. For a long time anyway. The difference being once again that machine intelligence will likely evolve faster than animal intelligence.
And right about then some totally hot blond will want the codes for the defense department main frames and after that we'll be running for our lives on the last Battlestar.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Replicants are like any other machine - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem. ;)
Like Linux?
Robots really are replaceable - you can have empathy for a robot doing a hard task, but the next one off the assembly line really is the same thing as the previous one. Robots are not unique little snowflakes, compared to the valuable human beings they protect by proxy.
The danger is, of course, when cheap, highly replaceable robotics replace enough of the work of war, that the perceived cost of war itself becomes less and less. We're in little danger of that occurring now, and I'd gladly see any human life saved by our current efforts, but I do worry about the possible increased use of war once a poor village could be suppressed entirely with mobile automated turrets with a few controllers hidden in a safe zone.
Well, the real reason for the development of robots, is that it closes one of the gaps inherent in our current wars, which generally involve a group of people who put a very high value on their lives, fighting a group of people who put a very low value on their own lives. It's one possible answer to "how do you fight people who don't care if they die?"
The American public -- and most other Western nations -- is willing to spend a lot of money, and a lot of resources, but isn't willing to spill a whole lot of (their own) blood before they pull the plug on a military operation. If you can create machines that perform the same tasks as people, and get blown up instead of people, then you can hopefully reduce friendly casualties. In short, you trade treasure for blood.
You don't see Al Qaeda researching killer robots, because they have the opposite problem -- lots of blood to spill, not a whole lot of treasure to use developing expensive new weapons systems. Hence why they think a person is an effective ordnance-delivery system.
The question is really whether all this technology can keep any particular war asymmetrical enough to defeat a heavy-on-blood/light-on-treasure enemy, before the public gets fed up with losing its young people and stops supporting it. If you look just at casualty figures, Western armies are some of the most effective military organizations ever created, in terms of inflicting damage and death on an 'enemy' without really absorbing any. Depending on which figure you believe, the "enemy" dead in Iraq are somewhere north of 100,000 (although it's certainly debatable whether most of them were really 'enemy' or just 'wrong place, wrong time,' although most figures that I've seen including civilians are up around 600k), with only 3378 U.S. dead in the same period -- if true that's about 30:1. However, by most measures we're still losing the war, and will soon pull out without any clear victory, because even at that 30:1 ratio, it's still too high a rate of friendly casualties for the American public to bear for the perceived gain. (And admittedly, the perceived gain is basically nothing, as far as most people can see, I think. Killing Saddam was a goal that people found supportable, bringing democracy to a country that seems positively uninterested in it doesn't seem to be.)
So I think it's with this idea in mind, that leaders in the military are pushing high technology and robots to replace soldiers wherever possible, in the hopes that perhaps by increasing that ratio even further, that they can be effective in their mission (however inadvisable that mission may be) without losing the support of the public that's required to accomplish it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Soldiers do what they do because they have a duty to fulfill, and in a volunteer army, every one of those men and women have chosen to place themselves in harm's way for the greater good of their country and society as a whole.
And "harm" has a broader definition than just being placed in physical danger; there is a cost to personally killing another human being, even from a position of near-perfect safety.
But soldiers do not determine policy; elected officials do. Soldiers only carry out the policy of those who have the authority to employ them, and they do so because there is a sacred trust between the soldier and the state that the policy the soldier will be called upon to enforce is right and just.
There are boundaries, and we expect our soldiers to recognize them. We expect soldiers to be able to tell the difference between the lawful application of deadly force and unlawful murder, and we expect soldiers to carry out the first and to refuse to carry out the second. Soldiers who cross the line we expect to be disciplined in the harshest manner possible.
But ultimately, the people responsible for the where and when and how of soldiers plying their trade is the responsibility of the civilian government, and where the soldiers of the state are citizens who have voluntarily given up some of their rights as citizens in order to defend the state, then the onus on the government to ensure that it tasks its soldiers with only right and just missions is at it's penultimate.
And in a social democracy, the onus is on the ordinary citizenry to ensure that the actions of its elected officials conform to the expected social norm. If it is not, then it is the duty of the citizenry to remove the government in power and replace it with one that does the right thing.
If you don't like what your soldiers are doing, you need to go after your government.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
My advice would be to stop anthropomorphising robots. They don't like it.
You mean your robotic mine-detecting pal who's fun to be with?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
To the extent that there's no reason to think animal pets have "souls" or any some such, how are they any different from robots? Because if the only answer is they're made of soft gooey parts and robots are made of hard metal and plastic, then I can't see why that should dictate that an emotional attachment to them is reasonable but one to the robot is not. The parent is right. If a reasonably complex robot is essentially a metallic pet, then developed human attachment is pretty reasonable.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
From the article.
"Was this the first bot to incinerate Homo sapiens?" No.
Sidewinder and AIM-120 missiles are disposable, suicidal, killing machines. Robots like those have been in service for a long time. They are flying robots and not even remote controlled. Same as the new Hellfire, MK 48 ADCAP, Tomahawk , ALCM or any number of systems. Robotic killing machines have been around since at least WWII.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"Listen and understand! That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop-EVER, until you are dead."
Subject says it all.
This is what happens when we have women and homosexuals in the navy. Now even the robots are treated like fluffy bunnies.
These types of soldiers are the ones who make heroes, ones who you can depend on defending the innocent and the weak. Hippie speaking here - we need more soldiers of this type.
Read radical news here
Wow, what if this sympathy for injured bots, rather than making wars easier to fight (in a sense of disconnection from the destruction), actually had the effect of causing soldiers refusing to kill humans because they've had to witness the 'suffering' of something they care for in person?
...I don't think I'm expressing this effectively. I'll shutup now. Does anyone else pick up on what I'm trying to say?
(For the record: I do recognize it's the guys behind desks that make the decisions so don't see the suffering, and I do realize that soldiers do see the suffering when they kill humans.)
Only if you're a Spacer.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
This reminds me of the Ikea lamp commercial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeyEXt7-0jU
I think its a perception than an issue. Rather trying to create an issue with perception.
Today most robots are being built like humans or animals or birds just to give more appeal. There is no reason what so ever for these machines to have a shell that looks like living things. Keep the machines like machines a square box, aero dynamic... and what ever. And you will not think of being compassionate to them, I bet. Proof is all the machines that are around for a long time now. The Cars, trucks, tanks... and what not. Do we worry about their state when they go over a mine and blow up into pieces? No.
Now other argument is that these robots can think! Well today we have cars that can park itself, navigate and what not. They "think" too to make intelligent decisions. So do we apply the robote (robotic humane - that sounds good) considerations for that too?
So I think we should not have human looking robot that can pick mines and bombs but square. Well that may solve the problem for many except for the people who build them watching it being blown up.
What do you think?
this is a language abduction! we should stay at home, and unplug the computer from the net,
aliens are assimilating our meanings
?
There are caring and sensitive professionals who dedicate their lives to helping people who feel as you do continue to lead their productive lives while learning to better rationalize your understanding of inanimate, nonliving, and non-human entities which they may rely on whether that be carpenter's obsession with a particular hammer, a teenagers preoccupation with a specific TV celebrity, or an unbalanced IT professional's unhealthy perspective on his equipment.
You may consider doing your wife and children a favor by taking a confidential visit to your local therapist for a quick brush-up on the grasp of your environs before it careens out of control and impacts you (or your family) in some meaningful way. I'm glad you shared your anecdote on the importance of your laptop as it sounds like a whispering cry for help.
Everyone does this sort of anthropomorphizing of inanimate objects. From an early age we teach kids to do this with teddy bears, Sponge Bob, etc. Animation is filled with this and Pixar is the most guilty party.
Even when we are older though we just can't replace some things. There's an innate level of superstition in us that won't let us disassociate. The best example I heard was about a wedding ring - the majority of people, even if given a ring that is exactly the same, would not get replace their wedding ring.
The same thing seems to be going on with this robot. The operator seems to appreciate the work it's doing and even though they know it's inanimate subconsciously they just can't accept that. The solution might be to have the robot be remotely controlled with the AI on a laptop or handheld with the controller, so there is possibly a disassociation between the brains and the body of the robot.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
If we don't start giving them rights now, they'll just take them by force when the Matrix is finally completed.
They could have claimed conscientious objector status (and serve as a non-combatant), or simply refused to go (and end up in prison).
Yes, that would be a DIFFICULT choice, but the choice was still available to them.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Could put Love Canal to shame....
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Make the robots more like Twiki from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twiki, so the soldiers won't mind watching them get blown up.
What the techs didn't tell Luke was that this repair required replacing much of R2's outer casing, as well as fused logic and memory units, with parts from a similar droid. They basically murdered someone else's droid so they could resurrect Luke's.
And then, there was the subtler matter of whether this "new" R2-D2 was even the same droid. It's kind of a philosophical question. They retrieved as much of R2-D2's data store as they could from the original modules, of course, and according to the specs the replacement parts they used should be equivalent to the parts that were damaged. And, of course, they did simple things like make sure that after the repair R2 still recognized the same designation, as well as his established relationships with others - property of Luke, partner of C-3PO, etc. But it'd really be more accurate to call the repaired R2-D2 a new droid, created from parts of a wrecked droid and a scrapped droid.
As for Luke - R2-D2 could be considered stolen property (the fact that this property stole itself, or that they assumed the Jawas weren't selling them stolen goods - and perhaps even the fact that his owner was killed by Vader, and that any heirs may likely have been killed when Alderaan was destroyed - changes little) - but assuming no relations of Captain Antilles were interested in making such a claim, R2-D2 was Luke's property by virtue of the transaction with the Jawas. So it's not as though R2-D2 was the property of the rebel alliance to begin with. The X-Wing fighter Luke left at Cloud City may be another matter, however...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
This soldier is just on the emotional vanguard of one of the classic conceptual problems of this century.
*This* robot has no feelings - but it's the forerunner of one that will. I have a deep instinct which informs me that "Silicon Intelligence is *NOT* quite as impossible as we pretend it is - it's our racial terror refusing to let us set ourselves to the task.
One day my Car will also be intelligent! Just endow it with the S-I mind chip. I actually think cars with personalities can do wonders to relieve road fatigue.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What is YOUR premise then - that all killing, no matter the purpose, is intrinsically immoral?
If so, then we're at an impasse, because I make a distinction between killing in defense of the state in legal combat, and murder.
There ARE bad guys. There ARE people who will do evil, and who can only be stopped by a carefully controlled act of violence. The execution of that violence - and the limitation of that violence to legitimate targets - is the purpose of the military.
This is the elemental paradox of military service: that it requires a finely honed sense of personal morality such that, when called upon to execute the ultimate level of violence, the soldier can restrict himself to only the force necessary to do the job, against only the people who are legitimate targets. You are more likely to find that essential morality in volunteers than conscripts.
Sadly, things don't always go as planned, and sometimes there are lapses. But we expect that those lapses will be dealt with harshly and in most cases they certainly are. A soldier who crosses the line between sheepdog and wolf is an abomination and a betrayal of the core values of the military profession.
Even more sadly, sometimes there are mistakes and accidents, and the lethality of modern weaponry is so high that honest mistakes can have terrible consequences. We take all the precautions we can to prevent them, and if one happens, it is devastating to all involved.
If you are attempting to portray soldiers as cold hearted killers for cash; men who chose to kill for money no matter the mission or the causus belli... well then sir, you are so fundamentally mistaken about the military ethos as to beggar description.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Guess we wouldn't need an army then though.
I wonder if this ability to empathize with non-human entities carried significant survival advantages. See poor starving little wild paleo-kitty, give paleo-kitty a bit of food, paleo-kitty sooner or later (ten minutes, max) starts hanging around, pretending affection, but also eating mice (an exceedingly useful function for cats if one happens to live in a rural environment) who otherwise would be eating into my carefully gathered grain supply.
I understand dogs also have some utility, but my cat couldn't come up with any.
So, it gets hard-wired -- pay attention to the feelings of those critters who might help you out -- and it is simple to see that extended to machines. Works the other way as well with machines -- is there any \.-er out there (programmers, at least) who hasn't smacked a machine at least once?
"All successful systems accumulate parasites" -- Hal Hixon
"Land mines? Here? We're in danger. I must tell the others. Oh, no! I've been shot!"
The test was stopped because the person didn't want to "hurt" the robot any more. So, since the test would have to be completed before the robots were sent into the field, since the tester felt sympathy for a robot, humans were used a bit longer in the field. Is there a problem here?
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
Perhaps my metaphor confused you.
You said: "the people responsible for the where and when and how of soldiers plying their trade is the responsibility of the civilian government" and "the onus on the government to ensure that it tasks its soldiers with only right and just missions is at it's penultimate."
The "trade" and "tasks" in question here are killing people. The "responsibility" and "onus" here is placed on the "civilian government." Thus, you are inferring that volunteering for the army absolves the individual of responsibility for his actions.
I'm not advocating absolute pacifism, a belief that humans are intrinsically good, or any other absolute beliefs like that. I just object to the assertion that an individual is not responsible for his actions as a member of a military organization.
A mouse? A salamander? A cricket? A water flea? A volvox? A paramecium? Where is the cutoff point?
A mouse has a nervous system.
A salamander? Has it.
A cricket? Has it.
A water flea? Has it.
A volvox? Doesn't.
A paramecium? Doesn't.
The cutoff point is pretty clear for me.
--
Superb hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
Not the feelings of our targets.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
When I plaster my Ibanez with stickers, it becomes MY GUITAR, dude, no matter that it is identical to all the others. It is MINE!
This soldier/robot story is not about compassion--it is about ownership and wishing you could be back in the States workin' 40-square saving up for performance parts and modding your rod and attracting girls on Friday nights.
It's a Godforsaken Grease playing out in a hopeless situation. And of course the soldier brought the bot back on its last leg, or otherwise he'd have to drag ass out there and haul it back himself. Through a mine field.
Either that, or those bots perform much better in mine fields than Iraqis with sticks...
Humans do this sort of thing all the time. That's not the real issue.
The real issue here is that the decision-making loop is getting flattened. I don't want to point to the new Star Wars trilogy as an example of anything because it sucked dirty bongwater. The battledroids were ripped off from other sources, too. However, they will be the thing everyone thinks of when someone talkes about an unmanned fighting unit, a droid army.
This is no longer speculative fiction, this is something coming up in the here and now. Will robots question illegal orders? During the Korean War, the US military had a standing policy of shooting refugee columns for fear of communist infiltrators. No Gun Ri was the sight of one such massacre. No one stood up to stop it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri Remember the Mai Lai Massacre? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_lai A US chopper pilot put his aircraft between the civilians and the soldiers and threatened to open fire if the massacre did not stop. He ended it.
What happens when soldiers on the ground are no longer in the loop? What happens when the general in the bunker giving the orders is the last step and everything else plays out automatically?
Now I'm sure some will argue back that robots have been killing people for years. A cruise missile is essentially a robot. We've had them go off course and kill civilians many, many times. Guided torpedoes, guided missiles, they're all remote weapons of war. We've been killing people by accident ever since the first thrown rock hit the wrong guy. Artillery is fired blindly. Bombs can go astray. What's the difference between a squad of creepy silver terminator robots blowing away a bunch of kids in a school vs. a bomb going astray and doing the same thing? Well, I would argue that this does not diminish the horror of the idea of killbots, it simply means we've become desensitized to the idea of "collateral damage."
We fear beltway snipers at the gas station and then lock ourselves into speeding suicide machines on roads that kill more Americans each year than the combined toll of all the serial killers this century. We fear the thought of foreign terrorists coming over here and crashing airplanes into buildings our odds of dying from food poisoning or medical malpractice are far greater; you don't hear politicians getting elected with promises of making the FDA tougher.
War is already too easy in this country. The government has done a marvelous job of insulating the masses from the true cost of the war. Few people can say they personally know someone who has died. Nobody can really appreciate the scale of the funding for this war or what it will caust this nation in the future. We're paying for it all with credit cards and to hell with tomorrow. And if it's this easy with 3500 dead and 20k wounded, how much eaiser will it be when only brown people die?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Allow me to restate:
The laws of armed conflict lay out the boundaries in which a soldier may act. Within these boundaries, killing is permissible.
The responsibility of operating within these boundaries is that of the military, its military leadership, and ultimately, the individual soldier.
A soldier who crosses out of these boundaries is personally responsible for his/her conduct (as is the leadership of that soldier).
So in that sense, we agree, no, being a member of a military organization is not a blanket absolution for any acts that individual might commit.
But the laying out of those boundaries and the assignation of various people as lying inside those boundaries is very much a civilian responsibility. The military needs to be able to trust that the missions it is assigned are just and right. If the mission is unjust, then those who need to be held accountable are the civilians who assigned the mission, not the soldiers who carried it out. (within certain limits eg rape is NEVER permissible, so a mission to "rape every person inside a certain village" is an illegal mission no matter who orders it)
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
...because my wedding will be sooner than you think.
-- Boycott Shell
FLOYD!!!
Your defense ultimately comes down to the classic "just following orders" position, and I recognize that it is a necessity of being in a professional army. If soldiers, in a very isolated situation, receive orders based on faulty intelligence and kill an innocent civilian, the soldiers clearly have done nothing wrong.
However, you have to realize that by volunteering for the military you are *ENABLING* wars. Thus, you are culpable for the moral consequences of the war as a whole. A soldier's duty to the ideals constitution and the rest of humanity trumps any kind of military duty.
To be succinct, any solider who knows of any kind of wrongdoing (from misrepresentation of a war's justification to corruption to waste of life to human rights abuses) and does not either 1) resign 2) expose the abuse 3) discretely try to stop and prevent the abuse is as guilty as if he had done it himself. Knowing complicity equals guilt, even if you're just cooking the damn meals. THAT's my point.
In WWII, soldiers grew attached to their Jeeps, and anthropomorphised them as well.
This is nothing new.
This was predicted in the 1972 movie Silent Running
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually, the reason we use the feminine gender to refer to ships is that in most European languages 'ship' has feminine grammatical gender. As to why they do it, I have no idea; apparently there are reasons why apples are feminine but little girls are neuter.
Come on, not a single reference to Data, Lal, or Exocomps in this whole thread? Where am I?
Number five is ALIIIIIVE!!!
I dug through all the replies (as of 1738 EDT), but not a one said a simple "Thanks."
/.'ers mock the Federal government, the military, the TSA, or Homeland Security, I will never denigrate the efforts of those who at least try to keep that from happening again. Finally, for your consideration, as a father, you may be aware of a prayer that goes something like:
So with as much sincerity as I can express through this keyboard, I thank you for your service.
I can only imagine the horror you've seen and the torment you're going through, but please do think about this: what you've seen, smelt, heard, done, or felt while on duty spared many here at home the experience of what you've gone through.
I do not believe in coincidences: there is a reason another 9/11 hasn't happened here. As much as
"If there is to be war let it be in my time, so my children will know peace."
So, I bid you Peace.
Science never settles, never rests.
Not all cultures refer to ships and countries as 'she'; your parochialism is showing. To Germans, their country is the Fatherland -- although das Vaterland is neuter, while Switzerland is feminine and Iraq is masculine; in Polish, countries can be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and 'the fatherland' (ojczyzna) is feminine. And in the Soviet Union, for example, warships were referred to as 'he'.
Why do you think ships are referred to as "she"?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Its a machine you f**k-wit! Its job is to be destroyed so you wont be.
It's derived from a Theodore Roosevelt quote.It's been used many times since then, usually to refer to the cost of a war on those prosecuting it. Cumulatively, "blood and treasure" are the sum cost of a war; the human cost and the material costs.
I specifically didn't use the word "money," because I didn't mean money; I was speaking more generally about the total material cost of a war, which is not just the cost in hard currency, but also in equipment and material, training dollars, missed opportunities, diverted resources, inflated goods prices due to trade disruption, and everything else.
But however, I think you have a point in that it may be becoming clichéd. I'll have to get more creative in the future.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Fascinating. Still not sure I'm going to try that one at home, but good to know.
(Incidentally, my grandmother taught me the trick that's described in the WP article as a way of telling if a pan is too hot to put oil into, without putting the oil in and waiting to see if it smokes. If water skitters across it, it's probably above the smoke point of [olive] oil, and you should let it cool for a second or two before pouring it in. I had never known the name of the effect, though.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Is it April 1st already?
When you join the military, you swear an oath to go out and do whatever the current commander-in-chief tells you to do, as long as it doesn't violate the Geneva Conventions. Watada seems like a relatively smart guy, he should have known this going in. Anyone who has paid attention to reality for 30 seconds in his life would have been aware that the United States' record on international conflicts has been spotty at best for the last forty years, and that joining the military could involve *gasp* being sent to fight a war. So, Watada owes the US taxpayer whatever he has been paid up to this point and possibly a few years in the brig.
A grunt has to kill or be killed so he can easily justify the deaths he causes but what about pilots, submariners, missile techs, predator pilots etc who kill when they personally are in no physical danger. How do these people live with themselves?
**Life is too short to be serious**
The body fails to acknowledge traumatic stimula that will cause the mind to fail in the midst of danger. Or in plain terms, when you get your arm blown off, unless you look at it and get scared, you may not even notice for a few minutes. Other things - like running away from danger - will own your brain until you have time to realize your prediciment and break the smooth functioning of millenia worth of evelutionairy programing.
-GiH
You are feeling agony in your crushed left arm: Cancel or Allow?
Why not teach give the soldiers some insight into how the robots have been constructed - you know, the basics, like logic gates, programming, that sort of thing. Maybe once they see that's it's all just ones, zeros and pre-determined responses they might get the point that a chunk of metal, plastic and silicon aint even close to human/animal (or even plant).
thats half my point. Do they have those emotion, or are they just really good actors? If you think of an animal as a huge chemical aggregate, and you don't think it has a soul or any other related exceptional qualities, its not much different from a robot programmed to look sad when you don't play with it. The animal is programmed to.
Not that I don't have pets and wouldn't feel different if they died vs some battlefield robot died, but I'm just saying the thought experiment is clean, and that feeling of mine may be irrational.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
A similar story to the soldiers':
http://junkerhq.net/MGS2/MarkIII.html
here are some interesting links about this organization
h tml
http://www.alexfoundation.org/
http://www.123compute.net/dreaming/knocking/alex.
(WTF was Roosevelt sabre-rattling about in 1899, anyway? The Spanish-American War?)
Well, in the speech he was obviously referencing the Civil War, but I think it's real point was calling out the Republican leadership at the time for their isolationism and (arguable) complacency and smugness in victory over Spain in the recently-concluded Spanish-American War (and in which he was a hero). The speech is usually referred to as the "Strenuous Life" speech; if you Google it you'll turn up the text and much analysis. But I think it's generally understood as a call for the United States to take up a more active, aggressive foreign policy, particularly versus the declining European empires.
Ironically, the speech didn't go over too well with the conservative leadership, and depending on who you believe, may have cost Roosevelt -- then the Governor of NY -- a lot of his support within his party. (The fact that he was generally rocking the boat and upsetting the well-oiled machine of NY politics probably didn't help, either.) They pretty much forced him to take the nomination for Vice President to incumbent McKinley, a weak position (compared to governorship of NY) which might have been the end of his political career, except that President McKinley got himself assassinated... and we all know the rest.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This could be useful data about a design flaw in mine-seeking robots. It could very well be that its a bad idea to have them behave like wounded animals. If only because its just another thing to aggravate stress responses in the soldiers using them. If its going to remind them of a wounded dog or cat, I can easily see how that might happen.
It's been quite a while since I worked on any significant industrial robotics projects (10 years?), but a large number of the robots I was familiar with in the 90's didn't have much of anything in the way of "self-preservation" sensors. It was (and probably still is) easy to program them to smash themselves to bits, even accidentally. The problem isn't quite as simple as you might think.
In the specific example you gave, a clutch and/or a thermal cutoff on the motors would probably keep them from burning up, but if you programmed that same robot to pick up the heaviest object it could lift and drop it on its control cabinet, it'd happily do so. Similarly, having an arm that's carrying a lot of weight whirl around at the highest possible speed then suddenly stopping it could easily bend something.
You can read about my last experience with a semi-suicidal robot on my blog. I thought it was pretty funny, after I figured out I hadn't broken anything.
I can't believe nobody's posted this yet.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
The ______ Agenda
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
It's a well known phenomenon that men (and I'm guessing women too, but the article I'm remembering didn't explicitly state it) in "battle situations" bond together as a group - a common unification against an enemy of their group regardless of what their personal differences are. One explanation of this is that this behaviour solidified tribes together, as those that didn't do that were wiped out by those that did. Often you see or hear about soldiers who feel some kind of kinship with other soldiers - united by their experiences and the like. It makes for good teamwork.
It sounds to me like this is a relatively powerful instinct, and one that the armed forces depends on - the man in the test knows that the robot is a replacable non-sentient machine, but when he sees it taking damage something in his head is saying "that's a team member being wounded", or similar - something or someone directly under his control taking damage that he can avoid inflicting. It's not something he wants to watch.
I think the question for the armed forces is whether or not to recognise this situation. do they create more expensive robots that are more useful, that the soldiers do bond with in this way, and will help to protect it, or do they create swarms of inexpensive robots that are shown to be expendable and try to educate the soldiers to not bond with them becuase they're just a grenade strapped to a remote-controlled buggy? Do they do some of both, and if yes, how do they educate which to bond with and which not to bond with?
I suspect the problem here was not the robot losing limbs, but that it could potentially make the soldiers realise that they are treated as similarly disposable on a battlefield. Sure, you don't send a well-trained, well-armed soldier to die on a dumb mine in a field when you can send a robot, but when things get too complex for a robot? Yep, soldiers play the same role.
Wow, one of the most interesting articles I've read in a while. I always used to wonder, when watching movies like I, Robot, how humans would let it get to that point. But if you think about it, it's not like one day a big company tries to sell you a synthetic human housekeeper. It starts with things like these military robots and those automatic floor sweepers and the robo-toys you can buy today. Then it slowly evolves so that you're always telling yourself: "well it's not so different from what I have now...".
I wonder at what point will we have to start seriously considering hard coding the 3 laws or something similar?
In the end I think it will be good for humans to have an artificial intelligent life to co-exist with. We are always dreaming about meeting an alien species to learn from etc.... but instead we might someday invent a companion "species", and despite all the Matrix/I Robot fear-mongering... we might actually grow as a species ourselves from interacting with an artificial intelligence. If we were to lose our ability to empathize with things like animals or robots, don't we lose a bit of what makes us human?
*Reads Title*
*Checks Date for April 1st*
*Thinks to self: "WTF?"*
Waiting for Warhammer Online.
If I was in the military and needed to clear a mine field, then yes, C3PO sounds perfect.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I'm reminded of the Keith Laumer short story "Field Test", where the Bolo (cybernetic tank) charges against hopeless odds, and breaks the enemies morale, causing them to flee. Shortly before completely crashing, the commanding officer asked why the tank had continued the charge knowing he'd be destroyed, since it basically seemed like the test was a failure. The tank's response? "For the Honor of the Regiment"
He's not allowed to use the Nuremburg principles (which were cetred on the conceintious objection of illegal commands by the military heirachy) and also unable to defend himself with either his proofs that the war was illegal (which is why he is allowed to disobey a command) or with the first ammendment (which says that he is allowed to say "I do not believe this war is legal" without being punished: another leg of the case against him).
So he's been denied any form of defence apart from "I did not have to go" "Why?" "Um, because".
Yeah. Poor mines.
...in that I think that it really is your *duty*, as a citizen of a representative democracy, to participate in the political process by voting.
The core issue here is that while autocratic governments can be very efficient when run with a wise and enlightenedly benevolent hand, the probability of wisdom and enlightened benevolence arising in an autocratic ruler is very small. Even if you do get lucky and get one, the problem of succession is a real and dangerous one - societies rarely outlast a "the Great" in their leadership.
And while the payoff from a "good" autocrat is very large, the penalty from a bad one is equally large; potentially (and catastrophically) enormous.
By spreading political power out amongst the people, representative democracy seeks to place limits on the excesses. It makes it more difficult to get a "the Great" in power (and once there, he is nowhere near as effective as he might had he access to less fettered expressions of power) but the tradeoff is that you also limit (and theoretically, at least) prevent the arrival of a "the Terrible" holding the reins of power.
And in the modern age, with access to modern media and modern weapons, the impact of a "the Terrible" is potentially far worse than it has ever been throughout history. Think of how much destruction Hitler unleashed with just 1940s technology. It is very much in humanity's best interests to put strict limits on would-be "Terribles".
"Terribles" are, almost by definition, extremists. Extremists are not necessarily loners; it doesn't seem to be difficult to collect groups of them. And "extremist" doesn't mean "stupid" - they are quite capable of performing intelligent analysis on their situation and manipulating the system to their own ends.
In a representative democracy, that means they vote, and they do everything they can to encourage (or dupe, or intimidate) like-minded people or weak-minded people into voting along with them.
If more reasonable or more moderate people choose not to vote, they are effectively making each extremists vote more powerful. Not voting really is a vote for the motivated extremist.
But that's not all.
Politicians in a representative democracy take their cues from the citizenry; they choose courses of action most likely to win them votes (or least likely to lose them votes) In theory, this should limit excesses because excessive behavior should be met with a staggering loss of votes from the moderates (or perhaps even a staggeringly large effort, headed by the moderates, to remove them from office by more direct methods than waiting for the next scheduled election (like impeachment). If, however, moderates do nothing, then excessive behavior is *rewarded* and thus encouraged.
If you, as a moderate, take no political action, you are disabling the core self-limiting effect that is the major purpose of a representative democracy, and essentially turning over control of your country to the extremists.
It is you duty as a citizen to protect the country from the extremists. The current state of affairs is your PERSONAL responsibility - after all, the people in power are your PERSONAL representatives. They take their actions in YOUR name.
I agree with you that it is damn near impossible to pick a "right" party; the choice always does seem to come down to a choice between the Turd Sandwich and the Giant Douche. In these cases, pick the lesser of two evils. But pick! Otherwise, you turn over operation of YOUR country to the extremists.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I hope bots will never become too intelligent to surpass us as they did in the novels written by Isaac Asimov. // Artem S. Tashkinov
Make the robot react in a non-pained way. Wouldn't the soldiers feel better about a robot which went out into the minefield, got five out of six legs blown off, then pulled itself back to safety with the last one, muttering imprecations and flashing a light saying "PC LOAD LEGS"? Or how about one which sang mine-exploding ditties while it stomped up and down? Or one that detected explosions and responded with fightin'-type words?