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Robot Rebellion Quelled in Iraq
opencity writes "The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."
Neither are (were?) these. All of the current systems have an operator somewhere... this one apparently just had a little issue with the remote.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Am I the only one to remember ED 209 from Robocop?
Sometimes it seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
They looked sooo lame. They claimed they could "sneek up on you", but the noise heard was deafening. They weren't very fast. In the demo the operators had full view of the actual field they we're driving (probably helps with navigation). They also didn't say anything of what would happen if some insurgent/freedom warrior started putting rounds into this thing... Then you see the BigDog mule or even the Phoenix (yes I know it has no brain) and can only laugh at the pathetic SWORDS 'robot'.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I'm not 100% sure if these combats robots are autonomous, but seeing as the article said "the robot turned" and not "the person controlling the robot made and accident", I'm going to assume they are. In which case I might ask, what in the bleeding name of Christ are they doing? We've yet to make robots that can drive anywhere near as well as a human, let alone fight alongside us. All we need to do is make the robots remote controlled, and they'll be better than fine (and the moral judgments can be made in battle). Fighting the war with robots is a magnificent idea (I don't even need to give my points on this one since they're so obvious). Now if the robot was remote controlled, then what in the name of hell happened? It's not something that should merit a 10-20 year postponement.
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What use would a robot WITH a firearm be, if it were bound by the first law of robotics? Human beings can use firearms as a last resort, but a robot running the first law of robotics would be incapable of firing the weapon ever.
Well, I think this comes down to a matter of friend/foe recognition. Humans aren't supposed to kill each other, but this rule is modified in times of war as it is OK to kill "the others". In the same way, cynically, the first law would still apply if enemies were tagged "non-human".
Asimov is smarter than you give him credit for. :)
Not to mention his book on Physics (real physics, very easy to follow) and his review of the Bible (a historic view of the old and new testament) among others.
I really enjoyed a book of him that I found in used books store. I do not remember now the name of the book now but it was something like "Asimov on Mathematics" and it contained a bunch of articles written by him discussing several mathematics issues such as large numbers, small numbers, the decimals in PI, etc. Really good stuff.
Oh, and I think it was in that same book that he have some comments about Star Wars films. I think it was quite neat to read him commenting about it.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
"Going to war _should_ be painful"
That only works as a deterrent if the pain is felt by the people calling for the war.
If people don't like wars they should consider my proposal:
If leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defense) purposes (or risk lives of a substantial number of civilians), they have to put their own lives at risk as well. Defensive wars are different of course.
This could be done in the following manner:
A referendum is held. If there are insufficient votes (for example: less than 66% of the population), the lives of the war proposers are forfeit. They are put on deathrow.
If more than say 33% of the population voted for the war (but less than 66%), there could be "redemption" referendums held later at a convenient time, then if each leader on death row gets enough votes, that leader gets out of deathrow.
A similar referendum is also held if at any time it is found that a politician caused the public to be deceived/misinformed (even unknowingly) and thus "justify" a war or similar military action (tricked people into thinking it's a defensive war etc).
If a leader was executed as per the above, but later it is found the war was really justified, the leader will get the equivalent of a "purple heart", and a nice ceremony will be held for his/her family etc.
The idea is that even leaders who have no qualms about lying about "caring about the lives of soldiers" would then actually think twice about starting wars.
Even amoral people without a conscience would be inclined to take things a bit more seriously when it's not just a matter of losing the next election, or going to jail for a few years.
If a leader thinks it is worth risking the lives of soldiers and civilians, that leader should also be willing to risk his/her life. That's only fair right?
Also, if more than 66% of Nation A thinks it's worth attacking Nation B, then people in Nation B will have less qualms about wiping out Nation A if necessary.
Otherwise, why kill people who have nothing against you, who may not even want to harm anyone, but are dragged into a war just because of a minority at the top? But if a country really wants a war, then they get a war.
Am I the only one having trouble that an invading force, armed with the most high-tech toys (in experimental phase) is just using these low-tech rebellians as cannon meat? Using remote controlled guns "to avoid friendly casualties" (the invading force) sounds wrong if the kill ratio is so much out of proportion (the "they are killing us" argument doesn't add up for an invading force).
I just know, that if there'd be an invading force, no matter how technical advanced, killing a rediculious amount of people, I'd aim for them and fight with my life too. No matter how misguided my beliefs could be or of those murdered.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Just deploy the thing armed with rubber bullets or paintballs or something (or just blanks). Use it for a year or two in actual operations, but without lethal armment, just to see what it would do.
Sure, in the meantime you're not getting any benefits of the unit and you'd need to make sure you had enough real troops to do the job, but at least you get a good feel for what the machine is capable of.
Granted, there will be those who raise the issue of how much testing is enough. I think that you need to look at this versus a human soldier. Human soldiers shoot the wrong people sometimes - so the question isn't whether the robot kills the wrong people, but whether it does it less often than humans. In my book that would be an improvement, but of course the way courts run the company that makes the thing is in for real trouble the first time it kills a friendly.
I suspect that this is the same reason we won't see cars driving themselves anytime soon. Nobody minds thousands of people being killed a year by human drivers. However, if you automated every car and only three people were killed every year everybody would call the machines death traps and sue the manufacturers into poverty. There is just no sense of perspective, and the only thing that matters is that the 1000 human killers didn't have deep pockets...
Its safe bet someone would get hurt; probably lots of someones. Regardless on your feels about the war in Iraq some things are true:
1. War always requires some sort of damage beyond soldiers and military equipment or it never ends. One of the host socienties must feel enough pain to give up the fight.
2. We have put extraordinary effort into not harming civilan populations, we have done a good job in the historical sense of finging wars but lots of innocent people have still been hurt. Lots of non-militarilay valuable property has been destroyed.
3. Acording to the article summary we have already demonstraited an inability to produce robots that can correctly identify targets and non-targets.
There are some who look at Iraq and Vietnam and wonder if our instance on 2 is at least partly to blame for our (I wont say failures, if we are beening intelectually host its not fair), less then total success. So a war fought entirely by proxy with robots(If they worked) might be a very long one. I would image it would only end when it was economicly or enviornmentally (those are really not separte) possible to keep building robots. That would be in many ways worse for the human populations then if we just died on the battle field. Finally we don't know for sure the robots wont work properly but I am not optimistic given fact number three. Hell we are talking about governments here both US and European alike that can't manage to execute their own elections acording to their own rules; electronicly or otherwise.
Why do think we could build a robot army again?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
As soon as the programming managers signs off on the robots saying "They are fit for duty", you send him out along side the robot.
Tell the manager that the robot will be fully armed and that the manager will not get so much as a vest. I assure you the quality will improve quickly.
We do something like this at work (no, we don't shoot the programmers yet). When a new piece of software is released, the programmers have to field the support calls for 2 weeks. It's amazing how much quality improves when you have to deal with your own mistakes.
So we've found yet another tool to kill people and are surprised to discover that it risks accidents and unintended consequences?
The really dumb part is that we're using Iraq and terrorism as justification. We rolled over them against much of the worlds protests in just a few weeks, and if we wanted could kill every last child with the push of a button. Despite their relative military irrelevance, they're doing a good job stretching our army to the limits and messing up our economy. Kind of reminds me of the drug war.
But they aren't the problem.
The problem is that unless we figure out how to make the world a peacful, friendly place to live *for everyone including our "enemies"*, we are one day going to be begging for mercy from an army of death machines labeled, for legal reasons "Made in China."
Idiots.
You mean like Iran did, something that had no effect? Conspiracy theorist hyperbole.