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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.
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.
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
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
I don't think that we can blame the soldiers for feeling sorry for the robots. After all, the robots are coming closer and closer to looking and acting like living creatures. We model the robot leg systems after what we find in nature, because we can't do better than evolution yet. We constantly strive to make the robots more intelligent, so that they will be more useful. It is inevitable that the best robots will be thought of as pets or friends.
While I don't think we need to be careful about being humane to robots, we do need to be aware of the psychological effect they have on the people around them. Watching your pet armored spider or laser-equipped shark get blown up is going to be stressful.
This 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
"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/
If they had mine-clearing politicians, we'd probably have a lot less mines.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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."
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
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.
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."
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.
Subject says it all.
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
H2G2 defenition of ackthpt:
A mindless jerk who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
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.
And yet, only one of our soldiers has had the character to do the right thing. And he's being court-martialed for it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
So you credit a "nervous system", even one with just a few cells, like in daphnia, as being the key. Yet, I'd claim that slime molds respond to outside stimuli with more "thought" than daphnia do. Why require *specifically* a nervous system, when it's not the only way a being can "think"?
When was the last time you ran anywhere? I mean with your own legs, not by pressing 'X'?