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Robotic Cannon Loses Control, Kills 9
TJ_Phazerhacki writes "A new high tech weapon system demonstrated one of the prime concerns circling smarter and smarter methods of defense last week — an Oerlikon GDF-005 cannon went wildly out of control during live fire test exercises in South Africa, killing 9. Scarily enough, this is far from the first instance of a smart weapon 'turning' on its handlers. 'Electronics engineer and defence company CEO Richard Young says he can't believe the incident was purely a mechanical fault. He says his company, C2I2, in the mid 1990s, was involved in two air defence artillery upgrade programmes, dubbed Projects Catchy and Dart. During the shooting trials at Armscor's Alkantpan shooting range, "I personally saw a gun go out of control several times," Young says. "They made a temporary rig consisting of two steel poles on each side of the weapon, with a rope in between to keep the weapon from swinging. The weapon eventually knocked the pol[e]s down."' The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated arms altogether."
Why didn't they have some provision to cut power to the weapon? If they were testing it in a place where there were people exposed in its possible field of fire (effectively "downrange"), they should have taken precautions.
The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated arms altogether.
As with most automated technologies it will make some mistakes, but less than a human on average. The friendly fire rate for most militaries is no where near perfect.
But shouldn't this thing have a kill switch? Seriously, my table saw has a kill switch.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Maybe fill the magazines on the 5th live fire test???
Just sayin, ya know.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Asimov's three laws were meant to be a thought experiment in hubris and unintended consequences. They were sold (in the context of the stories) as the perfect control system for robots, and then there were always "problems" that the USR management couldn't understand and which Susan Calvin needed to figure out and fix.
Asimov wasn't naive, but some of his characters were...
Regards,
Ross
From here:
Young says he was also told at the time that the gun's original equipment manufacturer, Oerlikon, had warned that the GDF Mk V twin 35mm cannon system was not designed for fully automatic control. Yet the guns were automated. At the time, SA was still subject to an arms embargo and Oerlikon played no role in the upgrade.
It may just be me, but automating a machine that fires explosives that isn't designed to be automated just sounds like a Bad Idea(TM).
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When you're talking about massive loss of life while testing armed robots that the military wants to turn loose on the world, sometimes humor is the only way to deal with reality.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
If you want really sick and twisted humor, try living in a war zone.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
150000 people die every day. That's almost 2 a second. I'm sure the family and friends of these 6 are heart broken, but for the 6.5 billion people who don't know them, it's not all that remarkable.
The only thing unique about these 6 people is that they died in a somewhat amusing way. If you want to mourn, mourn for the other 149994 people who died today that you'll never hear about.
Maybe not
I always find it hilarious that people will always post those "Laws", as if they were Universal Laws such as "1+1=2".
They are a set of fictional laws made up by an author for his science fictional books. Are we seriously going to accept every and all Laws that appear in fiction?
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
Kind of like my response to Slashdotters objecting to an automated weapon designed to shoot down cruise missiles, which leave too little reaction time for human-controlled defenses to counter, which save lives of soldiers, airmen, and sailors from massive loss of life.
Honestly, from reading the article it isn't clear that a software problem was even the cause of this disaster. It could have been some kind of mechanical gun jam.
Any time you are dealing with big guns, fast motors, high-speed fire, large rounds, and explosive projectiles there is a risk of disaster if things go wrong. These things aren't toys. Even if the fire button was completely manual things could still go wrong.
I recall reading an article about a magazine detonation in a battleship which went into all kinds of detail about all the things that could go wrong - and this was a fairly manual operation. It did involve lots of machinery (how else do you move around shells that weigh hundreds of pounds?), but it was all human operated.
Assuming the system is well-designed the automation actually has great potential to LOWER risk. Humans make mistakes all the time. They're even more prone to making mistakes when a jet is incoming loaded with cluster bombs.
Another thing to keep in mind is that peacetime training disasters always make the news with the military. However, the military has a fine line to walk - on one hand they want to be safe in their exercises, but on the other hand they want to be able to handle combat operations. A 30 minute single-shot firing procedure that allows for all kinds of safety checks sounds great in theory, but in wartime you'd lose more people to incoming fire than you'd ever save from gun explosions. Sure, you don't want to kill yourself, but if you're so ineffective that the enemy overruns you it is all for nothing. As a result we tolerate some friendly fire, accidents, etc.
Like it or not robotic weapons WILL be the future of warfare. Sure, one country might elect not to develop them, but sooner or later somebody else will, and once they work out the bugs they'll be overrunning everybody else...
Nope, unlike what tv may have taught you, people rarely, if ever, joke about something anything that affects and hurts them.
Let's see you cracking a joke about the robot at the funeral if it was *your* son in the casket.
Now, I don't see anything bad about us making jokes in this forum, since we aren't personally involved in the matter at all and can only feel sorry in an "abstract" kind of way (as in, accidents and human loss are sad but oh well I can't feel sad for *every* bad thing that happens in this world right?), and this won't be read by the affected people. But let's not go around pretending that we are "dealing" or "coping" with anything here. That's just hipocrisy.
Well, if you'd grown up all your life in the despotic, decadent corporate dystopia depicted in Robocop like those young'uns did, you'd be fairly oblivious too.
That's funny, because as a human, with close to 40 years experience working with other humans, all *I* can say is "PLEASE DON'T KEEP GIVING *THEM* GUNS!!!"
I would never want to be around a human with a gun, just too big of a chance for something to go wrong.
When you're talking about massive loss of life while testing armed robots that the military wants to turn loose on the world, sometimes humor is the only way to deal with reality.
Seriously.. this thing was built with the explicit purpose of raining death down on people.
And lookee, it apparently did the job it was built to do....
Only on people we've all decided "deserved" to keep their lives.
Unlike the people this thing was *intended* to kill.
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
My father is a paramedic, and some of the jokes that circle the station after a particularly gruesome scene would probably make you vomit. These men aren't deranged, dark humor is a very real way to deal with tragic events. These men are psycologically evaluated from time to time and the psycologists never seem to have any problem with dark humor. One has gone so far as to tell my father it is a COMMON coping mechanism, especially when one is trying to remain abstracted from the trauma.
I'm not saying they make these jokes at funerals (that's just called tact) or in the presense of civilians, but pull your head out of your ass and realize that laughter is a powerful healing tool.
That's coping, using humor. It happens in real life.
In this forum, however, nine South Africans are truly remote. They're about as far outside my monkey sphere as humans can get. You wanna joke about them? Fine by me. You want to complain about the jokers because you don't think people really deal with tragedy that way? You're quite wrong.
John
If programmers like HIM are writing the code for these "smart" weapons, then I think we should just give the things to our enemies for free.
Defense contractors frequently end up with bad products, but it's usually due to mission creep and gross mismanagement. Based on my experience*, I'd almost guarantee that this guy was lying about his experience. Pretending to have worked on a "top secret" project that you conveniently can't talk about is pretty weak sauce. In reality, there are two kinds of classified projects: mundane ones, where the engineers working on 'em can talk about the "what" of the program in great general detail, but the specific "how" is classified; and REALLY secret ones, which you can't talk about at all, the most you can say is "I work for Lockheed" or whomever. This "I worked on a secret anti-missile program" shit is a load of crap. It falls into the big fat liar zone between mundane and really secret.
* I was an intelligence analyst in the Army. I dealt strictly with excruciatingly mundane secrets. Boring, boring, boring. My father was an engineer for Hughes (now Raytheon). He worked on things like the B-2 Spirit ground mapping radar system. For years he "worked at Hughes", and that was it. Later, he was able to say "I work on the B-2 radar system. You'd be amazed at some of the cool shit we do with it, but I can't say what it is."
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It really must be an Aussie thing. My mate is a cop, last month he had to tell a nun, that her wheelchair-bound brother had lost control down a hill and drowned in a duck pond.
But when she asked how he died, he could barely hold a straight face so he told her to ask at the hospital.
Later she saw him and said, "No wonder you couldn't tell me how he died". Seems, she nearly pissed herself laughing at the hospital. She also told him to practice more, he'd given himself away with a tiny lift at the corner of his mouth when she asked.
Personally, I don't get what a period of mourning achieves. Losing someone leaves any empty place, but I wouldn't want anyone to waste a moment of their life mourning the loss of mine. Why is it that the west treats death as some kind of divine punishment, and the east tend to celebrate it?
axis discrepancy indicates hexagons beyond control anomaly
Automated weapons are going to make the blood cost of war (to us) too low. We need casualties in the millions before our dumb monkey brains can figure out it's a bad idea, sometimes not even then.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Huh? You mean on 9/11, 2.5% of fatalities worldwide were due to terrorism? And since then, terrorist deaths have practically flatlined, with rarely more than 0.01%, way behind pulmonary heart diseases, the flu, starvation, war, crime, work accidents, motorvehicle crashes and all sorts of other causes? You mean it doesn't make sense to throw terabucks into the War On Terror when relatively cheap nutrition programmes could save 27000 lives per day?
What is this, a remaining pocket of common sense?
blow your mind already
Every army that wants to be good needs to be a well oiled machine. Otherwise accidents like this happen regularly.
The parents "racist beliefs" broken down were:
The post apartheid government is black. True
Corruption is running rampid in SA, which has a black government. True
HIV is climbing faster than curruption. True
SA is now dangerous. True
SA government (which again happens to be black) spends money on needless things rather than helping the people. True
The facts are that in the post apartheid era, things in South Africa are in fact worse. I dont think it's a black thing vs. a white thing, but when anybody points out these above facts they are called racist.
Your issue shouldn't be with the parent being racist, it should be with your government being accountable to the above issues, whether the government happens to be black or white it doesnt matter.
Sadly, most of Africa seems to be following this trend which is a shame.