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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?"
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."
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.
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
Maybe if we treat robots well now, maybe Skynet will decide not to nuke us when it gains sentience.
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
Actually, it *is* possible to dip your hand into molten lead and quickly pull it out with no ill effects, thanks to the Leidenfrost effect. Kids, don't try this at home.
Totally off-topic, but one of the most curious things I've done is stick my hands into a giant vat of boiling toffee. I can't even remember the occasion, some school/college thing I think, but a whole bunch of us were being taught how to make toffee, and the stage of getting from the giant vat of bubbling liquid into smaller units, was done by simply reaching in and grabbing a fist-size chunk at a time.
;)
I'm sure it doesn't take much imagination to think: "Jesus Christ, TOFFEE? That's going to be far worse than water, because it'll stick and basically rip all your skin clean off!"
But it's well possible and doesn't hurt at all. You just put your hands in a bowl of ice water for a good 5 minute or so beforehand, til they go totally numb. Bash 'em into the vat, in, out, quick as that, you don't feel a thing.
Again, kids, don't try this at home
Who says human empathy has to make any sense? It's not like it's a rigidly programmed set of rules. We empathize with actors in a film, even when it's pure fiction.
Strange that you should pick the idea of the car. Some people get very attached to their cars (and other belongings) and DO empathize with them. Imagine a car you had first learned to drive as a teenager, lost your virginity in, drove your wife to the hospital in while she was having labor pains, and took your grandfather on a cross country ride right before he passed away later that year. Now imagine that the car has had it and will never again be feasible to drive. Do you take it to the scrapyard to be torn apart for parts and then crushed? Do you donate it to the junkyard derby to be smashed up and discarded?
Hell, at this point I'm not just empathizing with a car, I'm empathizing with a fictional car that I just made up.