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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.
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.
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
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
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."
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.
Ok, having been to a war zone I can tell you first hand that you're completely wrong. What the hell do you think PTSD is? You cannot imagine the total mindfuck it is to kill a living breathing person even if that person was trying to kill you. I'll have nightmares the rest of my life because of it, and that's only the direct instances. Nevermind that for what I did, I had a very high kill count even though it was more distant and I wasn't necessarily pulling the trigger. Yeah, we may joke about with eachother but all this is is a defense mechanism. If we don't "dehumanize" it we go fucking crazy. I have several friends that are so messed up from thinking about all the horror that they've had to do that they'll never really be a good part of society. So yeah it's inhumane, I did it because I had a choice. Kill him or he'll kill me, not a really hard choice for me to make but I have to live with it for the rest of my life. Once the trigger is pulled there's not taking it back ever. I do agree that it isn't necessarily right and something should be done. That's why I vote and take an active part in trying to get people out of there because I know first hand the horrors of a war zone, horrors that I hope people like you never have to face. Don't blame the soldiers that do the killing, blame the people in their pinstriped suits that don't have to do the trigger pulling.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
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
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.
There are others like it, but this one is mine.
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."
"While I have sympathy for your situation, every single (US) soldier who is pulling a trigger is a volunteer. "I was only following orders" stopped being a valid excuse for government-sanctioned murder a loooong time ago in an all-volunteer army."
Soldiers from lower middle class backgrounds without a college education are disproportionately represented in combat units. This suggests they are more pressured or inclined by their circumstances to enter the military. No one chooses the family they are born into or the environment in which they are raised. In many cases they may see no viable alternative to military service to realizing the demanding values and expectations society has instilled in them, and may be unable to see or acknowledge this coercion even when presented with it.
Add to this that the military spends millions of dollars to actively misrepresent the nature, scope, and risks of military service in elaborate advertising campaigns targeted at young people in such circumstances, and you have a truly despicable situation.
If you supported this war based on the premise that those there are enthusiastic volunteers having made fully free and informed decisions about their participation, you are deluded. Let me guess: you feel the same way about sex workers in southeast asia?
Oh yeah, because everyone knows there are no civilian casualties in Iraq from US military actions. Civilian casualties are civilian casualties, be it from terrorism, military invasion, ethnic cleansing, whatever. The innocent are just as dead.
You can attach boosters to anything. It just costs more. -
Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 07, @12:26PM
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.
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