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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.
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
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.
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.
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.