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Armed Robots Not Actually Gone From Iraq
NightFalcon90909 writes "You may have heard that armed robots were yanked from Iraq after a gun started to swivel without it being told to do so. 'A recent news report that armed robots had been pulled out of Iraq is mistaken, according to the company that makes the robot [Foster-Miller] and the Army program manager. 'The whole thing is an urban legend,' says Foster Miller spokesperson Cynthia Black, of the reports about SWORDS moving its gun without a command.'"
Who cares if it works?
Maybe they put the Telencephalic inhibitors back in?
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
So the United States Government says this didn't happen... They also said the prisoners of war were treated fairly...
coughWATERBOARDINGcough
Yep, the government must be right!
Something witty.
Three false moves prior to certification is not a problem. Compare this to false moves by soldiers carrying rifles, which are universal. Even if a robot were to point its gun in the wrong direction, the person controlling it, and there always is one, would not pull the trigger. The Army will (and should) let the Talon see action. Gun-shooting robots are inevitable.
I personally would hate to see this technology shelved for 10 years. The original story seemed like an overkill reaction.
You know how I know calling your armed robots SWORDs is a bad idea? Because I saw this movie, that's how: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112993/
The article is worth it just for this quote: "So, now there is now redundant wiring on every circuit."
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Like The Terminator, they'll be back.
"It can't shoot anyone [without orders]," Black says. "It's not an autonomous vehicle."
Can we not dream that there are artificially intelligent armed to the teeth robots ready to kill us at a moments notice?! If you take that away, what do we have left?! Do not bring your holier than thou facts to our paranoia party. If we believe hard enough that there are crazed, deadly robots on the loose, maybe... one day our dream might come true! So step off Sgt. Buzzkill.
I got a catholic block.
(Hastily tears down "Hail Robots" sign)
EX-TER-MI-NATE! EX-TER-MI-NATE! *Cough* Hrm hrm... If a crossed wire can cause the gun to swivel, then a crossed wire can also cause the gun to fire. Anyone else surprised to see that they failed to include multiple redundancies? Of course, one could put forward the argument that the more redundancies there are, the more there is to go wrong.
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
s/Its an urban legend/All witnesses have been silenced/
I'm an engineer for a company that writes some of the signal analysis for robots, mostly military. They are designed to look for people, noise, or something easily sensible and train their guns on that location and await further instruction. Its a de facto law for military robot design that a human makes every firing decision, but the robot is allowed to aim and ask if it can fire. If a US soldier did something loud (shoot a gun, slam a door, yell) theres a good chance thats what set off the targeting routine. There was never any chance of a weapon being fired, except of course if there was a malicious operator. I have not worked on this type of robot, so I can't be sure of the process. There might be a user command that says "go look for target". If the robot looked for a target without ever being commanded that'd be a pretty horrendous software error.
...that if the government actually gave us the "Runaround" we wouldn't be having any of these problems. *rimshot*
double-soldered?
After which (with engines and navigation offline) she had to be towed back to port.
Y'know, after those problems were addressed, the Aegis-class cruiser entered service and is still a very effective platform for the US Navy. Not that I think it wise of us to arm automated robots, but from the military perspective this is only a minor setback.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So it's basically a Remote Operated Vehicle, not some kind of autonomous drone. Makes sense that they wouldn't want to give up on a potentially useful project so quickly then. If they had, I'd say they were throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Of course, on the other hand is the fact that the Middle East has to be one of the most inhospitible environments for robots, what with the extremes of temperature, sand getting into internal parts, et cetera. I'm curious on what kind of tests they did with SWORD that these connections and such weren't fixed before deployment. Did they not understand that "Works perfectly in a sealed lab environment" doesn't translate to "Will work in field, without regular maintenance, in a non-ideal environment?"
Given his track record for pointing guns in the wrong direction, perhaps we should start calling the little darlings, "Cheneys".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
...his is a rush job. The guys at Ft. Benning did not approve this, but it was rammed through the "Good-old-boy" procurement by an ex-General. There wasn't enough testing done, and any queries by the Benning folk were met with hostility and accusations that they wanted to set it up to fail.
What's special about this particular robot moving autonomously? A number of other automated weapons have already explicitly turned on and killed their operators, without commands and of their own volition...
The the really insidious thing about this pursuit is that there is little personnel investment on the part of the military and therefor the government. This MUST be considered in a country where an armed populace is a right and is widely held as a means to defend ourselves from a rogue government. A government can put down the populace by remote control scares the bejeezsus out of me.
"It can't shoot anyone [without orders]," Black says. "It's not an autonomous vehicle."
well, and it turned out the operator wasn't John Connor, so it drove off to find him.
But one was seen headed back to the States muttering about "John Connor."
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Zap Brannigan already devised this elegant solution:
"You see each killbot has a preset kill limit. I simply sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their kill limit and shut down"
I bet after a few years of them "working properly" they are outfitted to be autonomous-and if bush stays around due to another war etc. they'll be patrolling american streets
Get your stinking manipulators off me you damn dirty robots!
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
Foster Miller: These aren't the droids you're looking for...
For which the passengers of Iran Air Flight 655 are eternally grateful.
I can has sig?
It's even scarier from the other side. The only reason the US is thinking of pulling out of Iraq is because of all the solders coming home in body bags. If it was robots doing the fighting, the US would be there permanently (and anywhere else they thought they had vested interests). Is there any effective defense against a robot army (other than a larger robot army, or maybe an EMP)?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I am not exactly sure what it means to "double solder" something. But obviously double soldering and redundant wiring add design and material costs. They must have guessed they didn't need the redundancy but, diligently they ran the test and it failed. So, now the robot has redundancy. This is how product validation works. If your products never fails during validation you're probably over-engineering them (meaning a simpler/cheaper product probably could be made that meets the requirements). However, when your products fail it is your job to fix the design and rerun the test. This is apparently what happened. I don't see how any of this is news.
Mad Cow Disease for Robots?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"(NT 4.0 based, IIRC)"
The Aegis system predates 'NT 4.0' by quite a bit. GC-47 USS Ticonderoga, the first ship to use the Aegis system, was comissioned in 1983.
Sabre! It starts with a bloody S!
I for one welcome our new gun-toting robot overlords.
They're on a murderous rampage across the country, their digital bloodlust now unsatable due to a stack overflow error.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The Iranians certainly think so...
Governments with killer robots is the one of the most terrifying socio-technical innovations facing humanity today.
It is unlikely that we will get rid of the robots, so why not get rid of the military governments?
How? Open source governance, of course. Instead of having nations battling each other, we could have communities debating each other.
The result? More progress, more freedom, less Skynet.
Short circut.
Thare, happy now?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Shouldn't that be, "You can have my soylent green when you make it from my cold, dead hands!"?
Government? The United States military always acts _only_ on the behalf of the people.
Shouldn't? Since the government is the will of the people, it should do whatever it does.
Mindlessly? The robots have robot minds.
Kill? They are just doing violence suppression and other active control behaviors. With weapons.
People? They only target certified terrorists, not actual people.
Sounds fishy to me.
None of the ships involved in the initial Aegis tests can be described as "automated vessels". The initial radar tests were aboard USS Norton Sound, later tests would have been on USS Ticonderoga. Neither use Windows NT, and in neither ship was/is the Aegis system connected to the propulsion or navigation. Pulling the plug to the point where the ship was dead in the water wouldn't have been necessary on either.
Also, there is no "Aegis Class Cruiser". The Ticonderoga class cruisers use the Aegis combat system, but so do several other ship classes (Arleigh Burke, some Japanese and Spanish ships as well).
There was an incident where an experimental Windows-based ship management system (again, separate from the combat system) caused a Ticonderoga-class ship to lose propulsion.
Do the words "Aegis Class Cruiser" ring any bells?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegis_class_cruiser
Not really, no.
Comment of the year
So it twists and turns a little without being asked, they'll get it fixed. If it kills one while saving 9 would that not still be better than losing all 10? They make it sound like the robot on lost in space waving it's arms around and running like a scared toaster.
This story is not about autonomous robots, it's about remote controlled toys.
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
This particular system was using NT, the failure was cause be a divide by zero error. really stupid reason to fail, for many reasons.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Who here still believes an Iraqi military contractor telling us "it's just an urban legend" (or "it's just a conspiracy theory") when what we heard should have canceled their contract, because their product didn't work, and cost lives and the trust for our troops?
The contractor might even have been telling the truth. But at this late stage in the game, with so many lies, so many unnecessary deaths, so many $BILLIONS wasted and stolen, so many arrogant coverups, so much trust squandered for so many years, how can we possibly just trust anything coming out of Iraq that simply benefits some contractor's bottom line? Especially when it's the contractor's word we have to take, and not some independent investigator? Is it even possible to believe there is any such thing as an "independent investigator" anymore?
If the Erik Sofge, author of the _Popular Mechanics_ article Wired is claiming now to debunk, issued a correction now, after rechecking his sources in light of the new denial of his story, I might believe it. I'd still be at least a little suspicious that Sofge was changing his story now only because of some kind of "encouragement" from the robot maker and the Army. But with just Wired, the contractor and the Army's word to take, I don't believe a word of it.
--
make install -not war
SWORDS.
Seriously, what is it with US military and silly macho sounding acronyms? You can almost hear the marketing meeting where they added and removed features until the project had a cool sounding acronym.
Back in the good old days you called a new plane a Spitfire and a new gun a Bren gun. You didn't make up some silly collection of 6 or 7 different words that spelt out PATRIOT or other such silliness.
Grrr.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
If I recall correctly the Aegis system control software was running SunOS at launch and later upgraded to Solaris.
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
You can have my soylent green when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!
You can have my soylent green when you pry it from my cold, dead hands, you damn, dirty ape!
And that ship had to be towed back into port because bringing the computer down left her essentially dead in the water.
I wish there were an "unpost" button. :^S
Yes, he's thinking of the Yorktown incident. Way old news.
Although, my corporate home office is still running NT4. Maybe not so way old news.
Anyway, Aegis is a weapon system. I think you can even slap an Aegis on a 747 or a truck, should the need arise. I know some aircraft carriers have Aegis.
The picture in the article is much better than the first article - you can see the whole thing.
I still prefer to see THIS whole thing:
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/scc_hq/fox2_03-summer-moody_0489r.jpg
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/HQ/newHQ.jpg
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
We used to see this tag on everything technological, no matter how benign. But malfunctioning machine gun wielding robots? I suppose nothing could possibly go wrong with that! Why no tag?
WinNT in 1977? Really?
You should stop and probably logout. You're only making things worse at this point. Please please start proofing your articles.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I think he was talking about the many human beings detained indefinitely in Gitmo who are designated by the legal status of "enemy combatant." It's a legal no-man's land without any right to habeus corpus and no apparent rights against inhuman treatment. It is a status unanswerable to any court, since the Military Commissions Act is now in limbo awaiting a Supreme Court decision on its interpretation.
The "alien unlawful enemy combatant" isn't just a mouthful, it's bad law. Basically, it says that because the detainee did not follow the Geneva conventions, we don't have to follow any international or U.S. law in our handling of the case. Effectively, it's U.S. imperial fiat. Arlen Spector, who chaired the Senate Judiciary committee at the time of the formal legislation, 5 years after the fact, sure isn't pleased. His amendment to the Military Commissions Act, attempting to restore habeus corpus, was defeated by his own party.
Last year, I watched Michael Scheuer testify to Congress at an international hearing on "extraordinary rendition," pissed as all hell that Congress was trying to scapegoat the CIA for prisoner treatment. His stated preference was that all detainees be given P.O.W. status so the "Red Cross could bring them cookies." He did us proud to say so.
You see, these language tricks you're playing are screwing our own people. It's far less trouble for our men and women in the field if they obey some kind of established law. Scheuer's exact words were, "Sir, a half-assed bureaucrat like me is never going to take a prisoner anywhere in this world without the authority of the executive branch." I'll leave it up to you to figure out who in the executive he meant. Prisoner treatment must follow established law, and if that law is so inconvenient to the "unitary executive" that it is ignored, then chances are the executive has crossed a serious line in prisoner treatment. An actionable line.
In the long run, there are significant reports that "enemy combatants" have been waterboarded, amongst other claims, in defiance of U.S. and international law. Those charges will have to be answered with something better than snarky, clever turns of phrase and false bravdo. The government's unwillingness to avow that waterboarding is a form of torture, its passage of legislation to indemnify those who may have performed it and other apparent atrocities, along with probable destruction of evidence of such actions, is certainly not proof, but it's enough for an indictment and a hell of a war crimes investigation, don't you think?
I don't want it to come to that, because I love my country, but if folks like you keep pulling this Soviet-style, word-mincing, "didn't happen" nonsense, it will eventually be demanded. I'd rather we gently and gradually distance ourselves from these lawless policies, and calmly apologize several decades later.
Which means that a future President will eventually have to apologize, just as the U.S. had to apologize to Japanese Americans for Roosevelt's internment camps. When a government gets scared, often in matters of defense, it must act without adequately testing policy. After the panic period is over, mistakes must be recognized and reversed.
The burden of proof rests upon the U.S. government, to a very distressed global community, and to our own people and judiciary. We have denied citizens their rights with this policy. The Geneva conventions have been subverted and U.S. law has been subverted. If it was just an accusation of waterboarding alone, you might have some ground to stand on.
As it stands, neither you nor I are in any position to demand apologies or retractions.
Let me guess - you've never admitted^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmade a mistake, right?
Aegis needs some pretty large sensors (the SPY-1 radar), the smallest ships to use the system are ~5000 tons. To make full use of the system, you also need a decent missile battery.
Aircraft carriers don't use Aegis. Carriers typically only have point defence weapons that don't need the capability of the Aegis system (which can track targets more than 100 km away).
I can understand them not taking them back to the US, since it seems there are enough random shootings there already.
$> cd
$> more beer
All these mash-ups of Heston quotes. I swear "it's a madhouse! a madhouse!"
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
AFAIK these aren't robots, but remote controlled moving turrets. /Still waiting for PACRATS
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Have a shitty day.
Never mind - once per customer is the absolute limit.