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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!
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.
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.
"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
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.
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
Disclaimer: I haven't worked on SWORD robots, but I have worked with the TALON on which the SWORDS are based.
The sort of scenario you describe is prevented with a heartbeat based killswitch. E.g. a signal is sent to the robot at a regular interval. If, for some reason, the heartbeat is not received, the robot immediately shuts down and stops moving. So, as you said, the robot "stops cold any time the transmission is having a hiccup." It can be a pain sometimes, but it's hell of a lot better than the alternative.
In the same way, dangerous commands (such as "shoot gun") require the robot to receive said command constantly in order to continue that action. So a robot being commanded to turn and fire just before losing comms would at worst, just turn, and typically do nothing.
Also: +1 Ironic Sig.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
No P.O.W. was waterboarded, as a matter of fact. If you have evidence to the contrary, please, post it here. Otherwise, post a retraction. Thank you.
A valid point, but the doublethink used to consider the prisoners NOT POWs would make the signers of the declaration of independence spin in their graves and George Orwell and Joseph Stalin nod sagely.
There are no POWs here... and no Americans in Baghdad...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I do not accept that waterboarding anyone at all is acceptable. But, in your view: how do you know that the person you are waterboarding is willing to kill or aid in killing thousands of civilians? If you can be so, so wrong that your intelligence can make you invade a whole country in search of weapons of mass destruction that do not exist, in howany ways can you be wrong about the intentions of a person?
Shouldn't that be, "You can have my soylent green when you make it from my cold, dead hands!"?
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.
In other words, the part that says illegal combatants STILL HAVE RIGHTS, and the right to a trial is explicitly mentioned.