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Killer Military Robot Arms Race Underway?
coondoggie writes to tell us NetworkWorld is reporting that one researcher seems to think that a military robot arms race may be imminent between both governments and terrorists. "We are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race and it may not be long before robots become a standard terrorist weapon to replace the suicide bomber, according to professor Noel Sharkey, from the Royal United Services Institute Department of Computer Science. [...] Currently there is always a human in the loop to decide on the use of lethal force. However, this is set to change with the US giving priority to autonomous weapons - robots that will decide on where, when and who to kill, according to the professor."
I for one welcome our new killer robot overlords yeah sorry, i just needed to get it out of the way to make room for the real discussion about skynet
"Is that an aibo? Man, I haven't seen one of those since ..." BLAM!
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Dammit! This robot arms race is only going to distract robot researchers from the vastly more important goal: the robot sex race.
Someone has to send the robot. At least until Skynet is built.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If robotic innocent civilians can be manufactured to replace the humans blown up by military bots and suicide bomber bots, then no one has to die.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Yes, I look into my crystal sphere, and in it I see the future comments of this thread:
* Yes, but do they have frickin' laser beams attached to their head?
* In soviet Russia, Robots arm YOU!
* I, for one, welcome our new gun-toting robot overlords (points for being uncomfortably close to the truth)
* References to the matrix or terminator series and/or I robot.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
this will continue. The advantage that countries have over terrorist is the ability to build these faster, and more, while the terrorist will have the advantage of needing just a few to hit a relatively none moving enemy. Of course, the real issue will be what happens when 2 major nations move from a cold war to a hot war. Will they use the robots and lasers? I suspect that the next "great" war will be fought in just that context.
Now, ir we can turn these robots into good civil use, then it will help. In particular, if we really want to settle on Mars and perhaps the moon, we will need robots. They will enable us to do the building in a fraction of the time and most likely at a fraction of the costs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why would I, a terrorist, go to all the effort of developing and building a sophisticated machine when I can can just blow stuff up?
Blowing stuff up is:
- Easier
- Cheaper
- Faster
- Harder to detect in advance
- Scarier
Maybe if I could take control of robots the military creates it would be worth some effort. But why bother? They're already something we should all be scared of: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/19/sa_gun_death_probe/
What about Asimov's three laws of Robotics? (particularly law 1)
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
(and ps: yes I know these are just fictional but I can't pass up a chance to quote the master...hell he even invented the word Robotics!)
Until someone can build an automatic vacuum cleaner that does not try to eat my cat, or an automated lawnmower that does not trim the newspaper, I'm not going to worry.
Even if the tech does reach that level, building a military bot is another level beyond that. And somehow, I think that it is not going to be well understood by guys whose concept of hi-tech is a retractable box knife.
It's gonna be a longgg time before I worry.
It is almost assured that we will have sex robots within another 10 years. WHy? 1 word; Money. How much money is made by prostitution? Even illegal, it rivals drugs.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Long and short, when we let robots do our fighting for us, it becomes so cheep to make war that its cheaper to make war then peace. his is why I feel that people should always be required for the front line, war has to suck so it will always be a last resort.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Really it is just a matter of how long it is between when you pull the trigger. Land mines, Air to air missiles, surface to air missiles, Captor mines, Even some torpedoes are all killer robots and have been around for a good long time.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Killbots have a preset kill limit. Send wave after wave of your men at them until they shut down.
It was the last part that freaked me out: "robots that will decide on where, when and who to kill, according to the professor "
I sure hope this professor is a nice person.
This short article seems to do little more than stir the FUD pot.
If you want to talk about having unmanned, remote control vehicles, some of which require little more than occasional supervisory control most of the time, I'm with you. We have them already, and more are in development all over the world. Expect to see lots more of them come about in the near future. As alluded to, this will be the robot arms race.
Terrorists using remote controlled devices to deploy and detonate bombs? Sure. It's not all that hard to believe that someone with some decent technical skills can put together a remote control kit on a full-sized car, then strap explosives to it (for example).
But c'mon. Killbots that can think and function completely on their own? ...and be effective enough in its mission to justify the costs of deploying it in lieu of something remote controlled by a human? Such a device is still a ways off for the U.S. Military, let alone some terrorist organization.
Get your RC controllers and servos now before the government bans them.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I think this is a natural progression for nations with an organised military. Once the basics are down machines can be churned out much quicker than we can train humans and you don't need to be as accurate and quick thinking as a human would be - sheer numbers and a shotgun approach would suffice and so who has the greatest manufacturing capacity would have the advantage.
Looking further into the future I'm sure wars will be fought totally on a technological basis e.g. hacking networks to shut down utilities and enemy soldiers to disable them etc. Maybe even further along wars will be won and lost without loss of human life - "Ok we surrender, we have no food, water or power and our Unisols are pointing their guns at us. You can have our continent."
I may have the wrong sci-fi series but I'm sure I remember a Star Trek episode where wars were fought by computer and afterward the required number of human casualties were euthanised to balance the books? Maybe at that point the geek shall inherit the earth and FPS skills will finally be recognised for what they are :-)
1 - Get naked.
2 - Coat your entire body in WD-40.
3 - Get on all fours.
4 - Scream, at the top of your lungs, "I love robots!"
5 - Close your eyes and brace yourself for a wild ride.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
1) Robot suicide bombers isn't exactly an ethical step down for bombers - and it lacks martyr value.
2) I imagine fear of friendly fire will keep handlers at the controls of robots for quite some time.
3) I think there have been a few robotic sentries made that act autonomously but constantly report and can be overridden (S. Korea, perhaps?)...
4) Unsettling thought the implications may be, eventually I think robotic, autonomous war machines will be built - and for the builders, it will be quite a plus. Probably a bit of a downer for everyone else.
It may be seen in retrospect as another of those "Roman Conquest" moments where a powerful, advanced culture stomps all over more primitive cultures - but the survivors end up better off, at least for a while. History, like sausages, is a process whose benefits are better (more comfortably) enjoyed than understood.
That should be the name for this. Model I-41.
That, or the obvious "WarCrimes Master 2020".
Or how about just "KillJoy-3000"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
There will always be a human in the loop as far as semi-autonomous weapons go. I'm surprised anyone on slashdot would think otherwise. Maybe 50 years from now an AI would have the intelligence to separate friend from foe from bystander but the tech is simply not there now.
:shrug: i can see that but not a pure autonomous firefight. For a long time a human will be giving the final OK to fire.
I imagine what we'll see is weapons deployed around the world with their controllers located somewhere else safe. That means easier/faster deployment and none of your own soldiers in harm's way. Maybe UAV's push proposed targets to commanders instead of commanders pouring over recon
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I've been watching this story slowly spread around the net today since I develop for some of the systems referred to. The whole thing is a bunch of hand-waving 'OMG teh robotz will kills us all!' page rank generating crap.
First, very few robotic systems in the whole world right now are even weaponized, yet we're supposed to believe automated killing is "just around the corner". Second, no military anywhere has deployed fully automated (no human on trigger/joystick) weaponized systems ever, yet we're to expect legions of them very soon. Third, "terrorists" will supposedly get their hands on these systems and reverse engineer them to their advantage - do I even need to explain how improbable this is? Military and private research funded to the tune of billions haven't even been able to develop these systems yet, but we're supposed to believe some terrorist organizations with almost no funding and little access to high-level engineers will be able to understand and rework these same nonexistent systems. Is it impossible? No. I don't doubt that given enough time eventually some extremist group will have a CS PhD/MS level member who could figure something out. That still doesn't negate the fact that no groups have even captured and reverse-engineered current robotic systems, which are much less advanced than this alleged future autonomous platform would be. And finally, if one of the major world governments developed and deployed fully autonomous armed robots, does anyone really think there wouldn't be a remote shutdown/disable sequence or other back door?
It's fun to discuss possible dystopian Terminator style futures, but it annoys me to no end when some researcher or professor says we're all imminently doomed and the net runs away with the idea. We're still very far from fully automated systems with weapons. Even US tanks, which have highly advanced target acquisition and recognition systems, aren't fired except by a human operator. You'll see fully automated targeting and firing in manned vehicles long before you see it in unmanned platforms IMHO.
And to stem off people who point out that many UAVs fly totally unmanned, with weapons, and with no joystick control - there are multiple ground operators constantly monitoring and updating mission parameters for each of these UAVs, also all firing sequences are still human in the loop.
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
The laws in that order confuse me.
Because some kid could walk up to a robot, and tell it to waltz off a cliff and it would do so. (in such a way as to not kill any people on the way down) I believe the second and third laws would need to be switched.
There are truely automonous weapons out there already: land mines
Secondarily there are cluster munitions that do automatic target selection within the drop zone. They are perhaps part of a more broad catagory of autonomous target selecting munitions such as homing turpedos and missiles.
What's next? Killer robot legs? What happens when they get the whole killer robot put together? I answer: Mecha-Streisand.
âoeItâ(TM)s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it."
No, it's an ARMs race because everyone knows RISC is better.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The reality is that casinos currently allow prostitution in, but will not trade in the flesh itself. They are afraid of the stigma. But once they can sell a sex bot for say 100/night with no fear of STDs, unions, worries about how they will be perceived, child prostitution, etc, then All of vegas will carry them. It will be followed by Nevada allowing it. And finally, EVERY state (save maybe utah), will allow these. All in all, it will allow ppl like craig, or haggard, to get their jollies and not be technically cheating. After all, it is not sex, it is masturbating with a sex toy. In fact, this will probably help prevent much of our slave trade that occurs ALL over the world, even here in the west. Probably 80-90% of all slavery is about sex.
Imagine a means to all but stop child molesting, by allowing these perves to molest a robot child. I will say that this actually concerns me in that it might not be enough for these kind of ppl. It MAY make things worse, not better. But we probably ought to try and see.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To those that challenge whether terrorists would use robots in the future, I disagree.
Terrorists don't make 155 mm artillery shells or munitions of any type. They rig what's available and hence IED, VBIED and other such improvised weapons are based on the highly available and cheap unspent munitions. Therefore it's not inconceivable that if sufficient "modern" militaries use robots in the future terrorists will be fashioning their new weapons out of those pieces instead. It will not be as good as the original, they're not going to build them from scratch nor somehow innovate since there's no need to. Just like their current versions of improvised weapons it'll be what they can slap together to at least scare if not also do some harm. It sounds crazy but I can see militaries in the future abandoning the "robot casualties" in war before learning how they can be used against them. After all, we don't seem to learn much from history and it'll likely be much like weapons caches left behind in past wars and other mistakes from a lack of foresight on our part.
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
unless they're also researching legs.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"With Folded Hands" by Jack Williamson, 1947. An all-time classic, and one that still gives me the absolute creeps today.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Whether there is a man in the loop or not, this is a dangerous development for the future of democracy. The ability to project force with fewer people in control means that it becomes easier to have a smaller military force of elites, who can be more easily controlled by an undemocratic government. With the U.S. government in particular, we already see in Iraq and Afghanistan a movement toward using private mercenaries. Without these mercenaries, the current level of force could not be maintained without a draft.
Now no one wants to be drafted, but a draft does have the advantage of populating the military with a broad cross-section of society. Such a force would be much less likely to tolerate being used to suppress a popular revolution if the government which commands them should go rogue. With mercenaries, and especially with mercenaries whose force is multiplied through robotic systems, you have a force motivated by money rather than allegiance to the Constitution.
So who wants to enlist first? Yeah, me neither. But we better vote wisely while we still can.
Who the fuck wants to be informed about that? The mind boggles...
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos