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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."
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.
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'
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
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.