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Packs of Robots Will Hunt Down Uncooperative Humans
Ostracus writes "The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. At least, it did mine. They are looking for contractors to 'develop a software/hardware suite that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject. The main research task will involve determining the movements of the robot team through the environment to maximize the opportunity to find the subject ... Typical robots for this type of activity are expected to weigh less than 100 Kg and the team would have three to five robots.'"
To be fair, they plan to use the Multi-Robot Pursuit System for less nefarious-sounding purposes as well. They note that the robots would "have potential commercialization within search and rescue, fire fighting, reconnaissance, and automated biological, chemical and radiation sensing with mobile platforms."
This is eerily reminiscent of the "mechanical hound" from Fahrenheit 451
.... can I just shoot them if they try to hunt me down? What about a nice EMP blast? And will they be armed? Or will they behave more like searchers from the Chronicles of Riddick?
I'm really not sure if I'm looking forward to that. Either they won't be armed, and they'll be easily disabled, or they will be, and then.... Meh.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Isn't it interesting though that the world has never seen a modern communist society... I wonder if one could actually work? People said a democracy would never work when the United States started and now most of it's residents would consider that statement to be false.
As militaries get stronger, as nations become more powerful, as even individual human attain powers of substantial destruction, we need to start looking at how we organize ourselves as a society.
Clearly, we are on the brink of enabling every techno-nightmare ever conceived.
Simply trying to "stop the bad guys" isn't going to work anymore. We need to change the way we govern ourselves. That's the point behind the Metagovernment project; combining the principles of open source and democracy with the new capabilities enabled by emerging web technologies.
Are you in, or would you like to see where developments like military human-hunter robot swarms take us in another couple of decades?
"uncooperative subject" simply means a person who is not acting by a set of rules that might put the robot at an advantage. Meaning, that person is not cooperating with the robots.
Assuming "uncooperative" has anything to do with laws or socially accepted behavior is simply projecting your fears and creating a context that was previously not there. It is simply another way of saying, "testing in the real world with no handicaps for the robots."
There are some major upshots for protestors:
1. It removes the justification to use lethal force. When the cops feel that their lives may be in danger, they have the asserted right in pretty much every country to use *lethal* force to defend themselves.
But if there are no real cops on scene, then neither there is there any justification to ever use greater than non-lethal force.
2. Accountability. Every button press and every seen on the monitor can be recorded. No more "accidentally" falling down stairs etc., and no more it coming down to your word vs. the cops' word.
3. As far as countries with bad human rights records go, well, if the wealthy first world countries develop this technology first, then they can make a point of selling only Asimov type robots.
Asimov would have written a short story where a Positronic Robot series had just been developed to the point where it could decide imprisonment counted as harm, and a human had directed it that it was acceptable as it offered a chance for the human to reform and become a better person. Susan would get involved over something, like the robot breaking the prisoner out when it became apparent the prisoner wasn't going to reform, or that he already had so the rest of his sentence was superfluous and so counted as harm.
Either way, putting someone in jail only automatically counts as harm at some particular level of mentation. Below that, the robot would assume that if the human got three squares and a cot, and better medical care than being on the run, there was no harm. Above that level, the robot would have to balance issues of human freedom with the harm a human might do to others exercising it. At still higher levels of understanding, the robot would have to consider how the human might harm himself exercising freedom. It's only an automatic violation of law 1 to a robot between the really dumb and the moderately smart levels, not to other robots.
Returning to the thread, the robots described are in the real world = really, really dumb category, too dumb to even apply the first law at all. That means a human would actually be fully responsible for any mistakes the robots made, but tools such as this let that human pretend not to be responsible for mistakes - that's what's really a 'bad thing' (tm) here.
Who is John Cabal?
When Jack Williamson wrote "With Folded Hands", his 'humanoids' took away all freedom to do anything risky. supposedly for people's own good. Try to go mountain climbing, and they make you stay inside, but offer a nice game of chess. A little observation of what the humanoids say shows they were trying to implement Asimov's laws, and the whole story is about just the point you raise. It's a pity that not nearly as many people have read Williamson as Asimov.
Who is John Cabal?
It was a fucked up experience when I ate it.
I was racked with guilt at the time. Everyone, excluding my father in law, told me I should get over it (me and him actually bonded in a weird way because of this). He has never antagonized me about it, and any time the subject is brought up in conversation he hasn't been the one to initiate it - and he never says anything critical.
In a culinary sense, it was good. In an existential sense, it was probably the most meaningful meal I have ever had.
I will never understand this sort of thing.
Unless you're a vegetarian, it's a complete cop-out not to be able to kill an animal.
I mean, I couldn't kill a cat or a dog, and I might kill a person who killed a cat or a dog, but I wouldn't lose sleep over killing anything I ate.
The only thing I still hunt is dove. I don't particularly like deer, or squirrel, and people get pissed when you shoot their hogs.
If on the other hand you ARE a vegetarian, I may eat you myself.
I realize that I'm not particularly eloquent, but Anthony Bourdain has covered this subject much better than I could on his show 'No Reservations' a few times.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Asimov will be proven right eventually. We may all be dead by then. The three laws are derivative of Turing's work.
It may be that the purpose for biological intelligence is to create machine intelligence.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But what about vehicles? Is a tank not a robot just because the operators sit inside instead of hidden away in some far-away base? Is the Goliath rolling bomb of WW2 a robot since the operator sits behind cover and uses a remote control to move it?
Aren't Asimov's robots defined by having no operator and being completely independent in their decisions?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What I wish to say is that if the definition one has of eliminating poverty is the "American Dream" of everyone owning an 11,000 square foot home, 2 luxury cars in the driveway, and 2.5 kids going to the best universities, forget it. It can't be done! Attempting to bring the whole planet up to what is considered an American middle class standard of living will burn through what resources remain on this planet like flash paper.
I feel the reason "poverty" exists as it is defined in the United States is finally because the resources that do exist are ultimately advertised, marketed, and distributed to the "poor" in a way that leaves them physically, emotionally, and spiritually unsatisfied - to keep people always grasping for more - and this is done intentionally by the industries involved to make sure wealth continues to always flow upward. If you can trick people into believing that just that little extra effort, that next little purchase will somehow lead to true satisfaction, you can always make them believe that it's just around the corner. It's just a con-game to make what resources are left bubble to the top.
Finally it all comes down to breeding rights and reproduction. That's what life is here for, it's what the specialized organ at the center of our bodies is there for. Perhaps the final reason for the existence of every concept of wealth, prosperity, and economic success is that it's the current measure by which one's fitness for breeding is judged. And if the current gold standard of breeding fitness is the American way of life - then by God those who have it are going to use every trick in the book to squeeze those who don't by the balls to give them the illusion of getting there when they're really not. The worst thing that could ever happen for their breeding prospects is for the masses to wake up and realize it's all a fucking lie - the closest the U.S. ever came to that stage was the late 1960s - and such deviance was eventually sublimated by consumer culture into the packaged deviance of basically body piercing and ass tattoos.
If all that's not worth a -1 Offtopic I don't know what is.
That's not true. Rule-based programming is widely used in practice. The canonical example is automated credit rating scoring.
Look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_rule_system
And incremental rule-based processing can be done very efficiently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rete_algorithm
Of course, current rule-based systems are NOWHERE complicated enough to understand concepts like 'harm'.