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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!
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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!
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.
Either way we're fucked.
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) 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.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
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
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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. --
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.
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.
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?
Well in a battle between a nation-state's military and a guerrilla force, "sophisticated" is relative and the arms race can be neck-and-neck while both sides still operate at completely different levels of sophistication.
Look at the arms race between the IEDs used by insurgents in Iraq and our army -- they go from simple stashes of explosives buried under ground, to re-purposed mines in stacks to even shaped charges, while we go from armored Humvees to MRAPs. They're still basically using cobbled together piles of high explosives, while we're using extremely expensive vehicles, and we're trying to come from behind in this race.
Or the terrorist equivalent of our cruise missiles -- an old station wagon stuffed with explosives and driven by a would-be martyr.
Similarly, a "sophisticated" robot or the terrorists might be a wheeled pallet with a simple electric motor and some kind of remote control (even a thin wire based one to prevent jamming or source tracking like they do now with IEDs) that can carry a pile of explosives into the line of police recruits or next to the checkpoint. While our robot has to be something with complicated vision and maneuvering and fire control systems, and that might put the two robots on somewhat equal footing.
Of course in the absolute sense of terrorists actually trying to match the technology we deploy, that's simply insane, just as much as it is for them to use APCs or cruise missiles when there are much simpler but from their standpoint equally effective methods. In this sense you're absolutely right.
Also, I'm with you on having autonomous guns that make their own decisions on when to fire is a very bad idea. You can have the robot decide how to shoot, even exactly when and where. But the question of whether the robot shoots at all should be decided by a human.
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