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Robot Soldiers Are Already Being Deployed
destinyland writes "As a Rutgers philosopher discusses robot war scenarios, one science
magazine counts the ways robots are already being used in warfare,
including YouTube videos of six military robots in action.
There are up to 12,000 'robotic units' on the ground in Iraq, some dismantling landmines and roadside bombs, but
'a new generation of bots are designed to be fighting machines.' One bot can operate an M-16 rifle,
a machine gun, and a rocket launcher — and 250 people have already been killed by unmanned drones in Pakistan.
He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'"
Apparently our fighting machines are still just in beta.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
None of the devices currently in use are robots. They're just military waldos.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Just because we are hung over doesn't mean you call us robots. It's just an unwillingness to deal with the BS.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Are radio controlled device robots? Or, is there a certain amount of autonomy that is necessary?
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
...do not welcome those who would welcome our new robotic soldier overlords.
He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'
"You call that a GLITCH?!"
That which does not kill us makes us... st
I, for one, would take a large pinch of salt with our UK tabloid overlords articles. They are the worst as they are the 'respectable' face of the UK newspapers which millions of middle class Englanders believe, but are the worst of the 'think of the children' brigade.
ive said it before and ill say it again. we dont need any more fighting robots or war robots. we need robots and machines that PREVENT war through simulation and complex analysis. robots and machines that can predict war, formulate resolutions to our current wars, and advance mankind as a civilization.
it does not matter if you take people out of the equation or "advance the science of the battlefield" to use a whitewash term from the pentagon. war is still a destructive force in which the net result is loss on all sides.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply...
Didn't anyone learn anything in the 80's? This could go very wrong in something as simple as a lightning storm. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091949/
Coming soon to a battlefield near you, EMP weapons.
I, for one, welcome my new gunslinging robotic ...
Meh.
I recommend Wired for War. http://www.amazon.com/Wired-War-Robotics-Revolution-Conflict/dp/1594201986/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242847860&sr=8-1 Btw...the company that makes the Roomba is also the same company that makes the PackBot and other robots deployed in combat zones. Same company http://store.irobot.com/home/index.jsp Different url... http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=109
Sorry about the mess.
We narrowly avoided that in 2000! But now there's one in the second position again!
Aww, it's so nice of our military to train Skynet's warmachines for it.
When the AI exceeds human intelligence we could have a problem with these machines... The singularity is coming if we have scientists and mathematicians. See an article how virtual parrots can be used to advance AI.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
Any machine that fires a weapon needs to be built with an excessive number of safeguards. If something goes wrong, there should be several checks which shut off the weapon before it ever has a chance to fire. The fact that this machine would go berserk and fire its gun in a big circle shows that there was criminal neglect and carelessness by the developers, and whoever approved this design should probably be on trial.
Is anyone else sick of people calling these RC vehicles robots? When I hear robotic I think of a complex machince, not a RC car with a M-249 on it(although that is pretty sweet). I mean, we have reporters talking about robotic ethics when the vehicles make no independant decisions. Until these vehicles have the ability to make independant decisions(like the X-47) , lets nix the robot talk.
Did anyone else think of ED209 besides me?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Fail safe systems fail by failing to fail safely.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
A Taste of Armageddon
This seems like as good a way to fight global warming as any. An army of robot soldiers killing guys = fewer dudes on the planet, which means more ladeeez, which means more baby-makin' for... no wait, .. argh!
. . . I would put in an easter egg that on random occasions causes the onboard speaker to broadcast stuff like "DIE CARBON UNITS!", "EXTERMINATE!" and "RESISTANCE IS USELESS."
...that Fox announced the won't be renewing "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" next season...perhaps they felt they had too many reality shows.
I found the article to be annoyingly "Fear Robotic Death Machines, I Saw Them In A Movie".
I mean come on, using Terminator as a source? Sheesh, trash journalism with very few interesting facts.
We won't deploy an offensive robot that picks targets and fires, for at least 20 years. There just isn't enough information for a computer to process and pick targets accurately. Contrary to tin-foil hat skeptics, the Military has a huuuuuuge priority in protecting innocents, even more so since they've entered Iraq.
Defensive platforms however are different. We already have automated pillbox robots that can takeout trespassers, but that's just a much more humane mine field.
Our future is going to be robot platforms that are controlled by operators. Sure they might be automated in nearly every aspect required, but the target choosing will be decided by humans, for a very long time.
A sad side effect of this robotic warfare is going to be the loss of consequence to congress for beginning a war, however I believe it's an inevitable step we'll have to conquer, just as building the first wheel was.
...
Searching...
Are you still there?
There you are.
*BLAM*BLAM*BLAM*BLAM*BLAM*
Target lost...
She never has a glitch!
http://www.summer-glau.net/gallery/albums/s2_promo/2x04_007.jpg
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I'm speculating here, but I don't think this is impossible, or even very far off.
We already have robots working in factories. If we ever get to the point where robots can be effectively used in war, we'll also be at the point where robots are capable of extracting resources. So, robots extracting resources, making robots, and fighting. Great, we've all seen this stuff in sci-fi, nothing new. But I've never encountered anyone talking about how this would affect world politics or the balance of power.
In todays world, the population of a country, as well as the will of the population, quality of military training, and natural resources all play a role in how well a country does in war. But if a country had robots as I just described, the primary factor in determining that country's power would be the natural resources available to it. If robots build robots you've got as many as you need, so the limiting factor is the raw materials and not food or population size or training etc.
So which countries have the raw materials? They win. For example, in this scenario Canada might be able to put up fight against the U.S. because Canada has alot of resources. As it stands now, Canada would get creamed.
This line of thought becomes more interesting when you think that the U.S. Military is developing robots as a way of making the U.S. army more effective, but maybe they are changing the equation so drastically that they might end up with much stronger enemies on more fronts.
Food for thought.
Technically speaking, a homing missile or torpedo could count as a robot weapon. We tend not to think that way because the gap between pressing the button and impact is short enough it's just like pulling the trigger on a gun and watching someone die.
Landmines and other boobyraps are, intellectually, about the same thing as an autonomous AI weapon -- they kill without human intervention, are impersonal and horrific. Yes, it's more frightening to imagine a T-800 coming after you and taking your leg off with a chainsaw but seriously, the results aren't that much different from a landmine.
When talking about the dangers of taking the human out of the loop, we've already got enough problems with humans in the loop. We took more kills from friendly fire than from the Iraqis in Gulf War 1. The more powerful the weapon, the easier the oops. I don't know how many top generals were accidentally killed by sentries back in the days of Rome -- kinda hard to accidentally run someone through with your gladius -- but just ask Stonewall Jackson how easy that sort of thing became with firearms. We'd never have gone through and killed an entire bunker of civilians by accident if our soldiers were doing the work with knives but that becomes as easy as an oops when dropping LGB's from bombers on the word of some faulty intel. Powerful weapons compound and magnify human errors.
Aside from the typical fear we have at the thought of impersonal killing machines taking us out, I think we have two other big fears -- 1) war becomes easier and less painful when robots are doing the dying and 2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
We've had bad wars historically but the 20th century really had them all beat. Technology allowed for total war, the bending of an entire nation's will to the obliteration of another. Ambitions grew bigger, power could be projected further, and the world became a smaller, more dangerous place. Battlefield robots will be a continuation of this trend.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I can smell it, when reading about the nine dead soldiers in South Africa. Conventional programming is not up to the task of battlefield AI. Considering how bugs get out of hand with increasing complexity of software, such that past a point, your software will never be even safe to hold a gun. Current software only needs a single bit flipped out of countless trillions to get bad data into the software, and if in the wrong place, there is a possibility of unpredictable behavior or outright failure.
That is before we start talking about bugs in code.
This is fine for desktop software, your app just does something weird, or crashes outright, and you reboot, your fine. This is not adequate when your computer is pointing a shotgun or a mortar at you.
Now what I imagine here, is that these robots aren't controlled by minimal hardened micro controllers, such as those that keep a Airbus A380 from falling out of the sky, but far too high-level processing, using commodity parts. Thus, just like your leaking Firefox browser with too many tabs open it all goes weird then crashes, popping off a few rounds before it goes down.
Either that or the killbots are finally here...
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Technically speaking, a homing missile or torpedo could count as a robot weapon.
The difference is that the new kind isn't kamikaze.
You can't take the sky from me...
Because my robot has spell-check and would not misspell damage as damange.
Didn't they kill the future combat system?
"Oh. I forgot to carry the one."
Blue screen of death revisited. Better maintain those firewall, antivirus and windows updates again; a botnet of those 12000 bots does give a new meaning to 'software glitch'.
The Talon is unarmed, but can be disturbingly temperamental. Singer gives a worrying example of one sergeant just back from Iraq who described how his Talon robot acted 'erratically'.
Another told how his robot would 'drive off the road, come back at you, spin around, stuff like that'.
I spoke to one soldier in the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry division, stationed at Forward Operating base Kalsu, 20 miles south of Baghdad, who works with Talons.
I once spoke to a guy who knew guy who said that a friend he worked with played with one of these things and they were great.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
the sleestak fossil revealed yesterday was a nice advertisement for the upcoming land of the lost will ferrell movie
and electing a vulcan as president of the united states was a nice pr coup for the star trek movie now playing
but when the armed forces start building real terminators just to plug the upcoming christian bale terminator salvation movie, this hollywood pr stunt business has gotten a little out of hand
i'm sorry i have to draw the line. what next? someone releases a global pandemic just to plug... oh wait
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Chicken! Fight like a robot!
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
our enemies I'm sure there are those of us who believe this is the way to prevent war. It seems like there's a generalized reality distortion field around technology which inhibits a part of the brain which might otherwise be concerned about freedom or morality or atrocity but history is full of bell-curves.
Quack, quack.
>robots and machines that can predict war, formulate resolutions to our current wars,
>and advance mankind as a civilization.
Such machines and algorithms will be developed, but they will be used to create better, more efficient machines of war.
So long as there are scarce resources, there will be men who's greed for them drives them to kill for them.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
A robot that can sing "kum ba ya".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
...I'm a huge fan of these devices. I didn't think I would be, but that has changed.
The ability to remove the operator from physical danger - in this case, I'm speaking of Predator and Reaper and similar UAVs - has made huge strides in removing the "fog of war". You aren't seeing as many life-or-death decisions made by a 17 year old scared witless, or by a cowboy pilot strung out on amphetamines looking for an excuse to use his weapons, or major decisions made on partial information, rumour, and the threat of risk. Instead, the people processing the information are well-rested, alert, and calm - and they can easily get a second opinion on what they are seeing.
So when UAV overwatch tells a unit under fire that the shooter is over by those trees, not in the village, lives are saved. When a couple of UAV operators put their heads together and determine that the dude digging in a culvert in the middle of the night is actually a farmer cleaning out his irrigation ditch, not an IED emplacer, lives are saved. And when the UAV sees a guy plant an IED and it both reports the IED location and blows the bomb emplacer up, lives are saved.
Yes, it would be better for everyone if there were no wars. It would also be better if there were no murderers, adulterers, rapists, and child molesters too. Given that war is not going away any time soon, I'm all for technology enabling that the right people get killed and the innocents be let be.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
we need robots and machines that PREVENT war through simulation and complex analysis.
After all, the only winning move is not to play.
And the optimal solution these machines will find is that the human race needs a big baby sitter or just needs to die. This way Peace will rain supreme.
'the tank was created after Winston Churchill read the science fiction of H.G. Wells.'
Sometimes fiction does become reality other times fiction is definitely fiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank
According to the all-knowing oracle Wikipedia - "The word robota means literally work, labor or serf labor, and figuratively "drudgery" or "hard work" in Czech" So you could argue that the military has always used robots.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
science delivers the good, whereas philosophers deliver nothing.
I am talking about modern philosopher, not philosophers from a time where that means educator and 'scientist'. Experimenter might be a better term there.
I was a philosophy major until I learned the number 1 thing said by philosophers:
"You want fries with that?"
maybe
"Do you want fries with that, or do you just think you want fries with that?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
ads like that here? please...
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
There will obviously be glitches, and there will be instances of killing the wrong people. That on the other hand is already happening with "normal" soldiers. You can replace glitches with raping/murdering because they think they can get away with it (see Blackwater).
The problems are with the people at home not getting leaked photos of these killings, the body bags of our own soldiers and the soldiers refusing the unjust cause. These are not bugs they are features. Without these I doubt George W Bush would have been AS unpopular as he was.
The most frightening thing is if you consider robots on home soil. Sure there are bastards in the justice system. Sure there are people who are willing to do monstrous things, often thinking of some greater good. But there is still some limit somewhere.
Combined with the surveillance of ordinary people, this could make civil disobedience and revolution impossible. Today's military technology would have made the American revolution impossible. Tomorrows military technology would have given a different ending to V For Vendetta, and invites now democracies to have their own Tiananmen Square in the future.
Hopefully it was just a bunch of egg sucking OCP executives.
Fully autonomous robots, while moderately dangerous are likely to remain more of a novelty weapon for the next 100 years.
It took 30 years of AI development in computer simulations, and even today, fully unrestricted AI is still far from being equal to human intellect. In modern computer games, the AI has to usually "cheat" by giving it inaccessible to players resources and abilities in order to put up a good fight. FPS AI can see through walls (even if it pretends not to), it can calculate exactly how to shoot in order to hit you, and moves using an idealistic predefined pathing map that tells it where to go, and where not to go. RTS AI can see the entire map and gets more resources/units than human players. Even the best chess computer in the world hasn't been able to beat the best human at it.
Remove all the little cheats and you will have a dumb looking free kill that keeps running in the wall and shooting itself in the foot.
Translated into the real world, robots will be more likely to fall off a cliff than shoot the enemy.
Furthermore, there is not a single algorithm that can efficiently and quickly evaluate the surrounding terrain, let alone identify objects and meatbags to shoot at.
Today's AI would be no more useful than sentry guns with motion sensors. And these things don't exactly distinguish between soldiers and civilians. Or random moving crap that gets in the way.
I am far more concerned with these remotely controlled contraptions. Remove the psychological aspect of being in the battlefield and the danger of retaliation and suddenly these "software bugs" would so common, that sendmail will look like the Alcatraz of computer security compared to them.
Hopefully, they won't get some silly acronym name like "Neutralizing Encounter and Recon Danger Resolution Automated Guardian Element 2.0" or we might as well start capturing pokemons for the US army.
This is beginning to sound like the droids from Star Wars. Scary.
I wouldn't mind a robot that would consistently disassemble, clean, lubricate, and reassemble a rifle. Sure, this sort of maintenance can be relaxing, but at times it can be a hassle because I'd rather be catching up on my sleep.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I'm refer to the large number of complaints from Afghanistan and Pakistan about air-drone attacks. I dont think the drones are any more or less accurate in distinguishing civilians from foe than real soldiers. Mainly because its similar soldiers operating both ways. But maybe there more fear when a machine gets you instead of a person. Put yourself in their shoes and see how you'd feel.
They are remotely operated mechanical armed units - or R.O.M.A.N. Please feel free to spread this new acronym so we can have better discourse on the subject. Also, there are no unmanned drones. They are manned from a distance, remotely. They are not autonomous as the term "unmanned drone" implies. Of course the military is working on such hardware but it is still in the R&D stage.
However this concept of ROBOT killware does lead me to ask a question about second amendment rights: Do such devices, either ROMANS or ROBOTS, constitute 'arms' and as such are they then permitted to be owned by civilians as an expression of their second amendment rights?
If so then I'd suggest that for the truly autonomous ROBOT weapons systems you could no longer use the defensive catch phrase "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
... nothing a couple pulse grenades can't handle.
Anybody remember Colin Kapp's short story by that name? It supposedly inspired the board game Ogre. Gottlos was set amidst a devastated landscape in what would appear to be Europe sometime in this century. Use of warmechs was in full swing, and the latest generations were controlled by humans who were temporarily connected through broadband trasmission gear. The story was told through the eyes of one of them, Manton, who controlled an advanced warmech named Fiendish.
We learn from Manton that the operators have personality changes the tighter the coupling, the more the change, and they become capable of incredible atrocities like tearing people apart with their manipulators, and seldom, if ever, take prisoners. (When I get on a motorcycle, my personality changes.) "But in total war, the only thing that counts is coming out of with a whole skin."
Manton/Fiendish eventually encounters an enemy greuelmech named Gottlos. Gottlos wtches Fiendish slaugter a bunch of his own troops without intervening, and then casually takes Fiendish apart. Manton eventually realizes that Gottlos' operator has been permanently/irreversibly hardwired into the warmech... One of the most chilling stories I've ever read. Now is about the right time for the advent of the greuelmech.
It's a pet peeve of mine when people use the term "unmanned drone" when referring to remote-piloted drones. Unless I'm mistaken, every Reaper, Predator, or other drone firing live ammunition is still has a real person pulling the trigger (and usually controlling flight). Most planes are now "fly-by-wire", which is just local "remote control". The pilot may be in the craft, but they aren't connected mechanically to the ailerons any more than someone sitting at a joystick in a trailer on the ground.
Saying that people are already being killed by unmanned drones elicits thoughts of autonomous killing machines. We aren't quite there yet, so let's be accurate and avoid the FUD.
Yea, software glitch... good story. Get real, the thing was hacked into as part of an exercise to see whether we can commandeer a foreign country's electronic munitions.
Don't believe me? We've done far worse... and our warfare capabilities are always grossly under-exaggerated in anything you can read that's not classified.
P.S. - "we" = usa
Of course the total incident of war and death from war is declining with time.
Too bad this is not exciting enough for most people to talk about.
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/34846
"The 'Human Security Brief 2007,' compiled by Canada's Simon Fraser University, details the continuing overall decline in global conflict [...]
As a result, total deaths from conflicts are now lower than the world has ever seen. [...] far fewer wars and much less death from them."
See also, the following, on how international conflict is decreasing globally. Reading the above article reminded me of this:
Polachek, S., Seiglie, C., and Xiang, J. 2007. 'The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on International Conflict', Defence and Peace Economics, 18: 415-429. ISSN 1024-2690
These people are either too stupid or too inexperienced to be making dangerous machines.
Anything that can't possibly happen, will happen. Machines fail in the most awkward ways. The most junior CNC designer knows this: that every device that could do harm has a remotely operated kill switch whose action bypasses all the machine's control systems, kills primary power and causes all components to fail safe (trigger finger relaxes, brakes go full on, ...).
Putting a gun on a machine without a remote kill switch goes beyond incompetence and stumbles incoherently into criminal negligence.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Current weapons such as "an M-16 rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher" are optimized for human arms/hands/body. For example, a pistol's handle is made to fit a person's hand. Robots do not need these things, so weapons can be completely redesigned for robots. Therefore, it makes no sense for the summary to say "One bot can operate an M-16 rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher." Robots' weapons, at the very least, do not need a handle the size of a human hand.
What was the name of that 1970's US film, a B movie, which took place in space, aboard a ship of (y)hippie'ish long haired dudes, with a sentient bomb that repeatedly kept deploying---in error---and the crew kept having to annoyingly talk the bomb down.
I saw it a couple of times in passing, via the late-night movie feature. But I saw it in little pieces, as it was so cheesy B cinema. But I thought it was fabulous the way it ended.
Mid sentence, mid travel, one more time: come on bomb! there you go again! just go bac' KABOOM!
Now that is AI. The same sort of idea was used in a TNG episode.
This is definitely a revolution in military affairs, maybe more than nuclear weapons, because this technology will definitely be used by all sides. A lot of third world countries could probably almost be taken over right now by remote control, and with improved autonomous capabilities I can't see it being much of a problem in the future. The possibilities for proxy wars are really interesting -- what's to stop the U.S., China and Russia from waging remote-control robot wars for control of resource-rich countries in the third world? The natives with AK-47's won't be able to offer much resistance, and the political cost to the robotic powers could be minimal if the only casualties are machines. I think this is the brave new world we're moving into: robot police actions vs. terrorists in failed states and proxy robotic resource wars between the major powers. Then of course there's the possibility of a modern day Saruman, some power mad industrialist, mass-producing robots instead of Uruk-Hai and unleashing them on the world for his own nefarious purposes. It should be quite interesting to watch this technology develop -- it all reminds me of a real life anime movie or Philip K. Dick novel.
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country
The Times is read by people who actually do run the country
the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country
the Financial Times is read by people who own the country
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country
The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is
Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Canada can make mechanical lumberjacks because of this technology? What?
Right now we have plenty of robots in combat. We have 12,000 unmanned flying machines. They are remotely managed at a rate of 1:1 (man per machine). The military is very much interested in making that ratio more efficient. I imagine the next phase will be remotely controlling multiple drones at once ala StarCraft. Then the strategy aspect and resource management will be more important than the individual decisions. The first group of developers to market such systems are going to be very wealthy :)
2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
Nor would they refuse an illegal order.
:)
(or illegal operation, if you prefer..)
2) a robot will never refuse a legal yet immoral order.
Nor would they refuse an illegal order.
(or illegal operation, if you prefer..) :)
There's the "legal" according to the law order and then there's the one following the proper chain of command with the right permissions. If I'm the general and I'm in charge of this unit and I'm authorized to tell it what to shoot, then telling it to shoot a tank is legal. It may also be legal for the general to tell it to shoot up a group of children walking to school. That's illegal according to the Geneva Conventions and common morality but legal as far as permissions go. I think the military would sooner let the human operator worry about who to shoot and let the robot worry about how to shoot.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
As it currently stands, a human operator makes all kill orders, be it dropping a bomb from an F117 to ordering a predator drone to open fire. DoD culture simply does not presently allow for autonomous robots with lethal weaponry. (Though it could be argues this is less about ethical issues and more about preserving the current way of life in the armed services)
The real challenge is going to be IFF software - how do you judge a civilian from a combatant, or one side's soldiers from the other?
Have the robot visually detect stuff pointed at it.
Fire ONE warning shot in the air.
See if people scatter (AWAY from the robot).
If they don't, OPEN FIRE ON THEM! (Or if they throw stuff at it [could be grenades and not rocks])
(Doesn't acount for hidden snipers with RPGs though.)
Money and firearms are the TRUE language of this world. Just about everybody respects them regardless of language or culture.
Feel free to poke holes in my simple combat AI. My approach doesn't need to waste time (or memory storage capacity) trying to identify a weapon someone is pointing at it.
But seriously, the 'combat waldo' concept is enough for modern, 'high-tech' warfare -- ED-209 in ROBOCOP (1987) proved an armed, autonomous robot going haywire can lead to disaterous results to those operating/using them against the enemy.
In other words, when it comes to warfare, keep people 'in the loop'. This is done at the highest level with nuclear missile command and control to prevent what happened in DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) and what almost happened in WarGames (1983) from ACTUALLY happening. Even then, there were several 'close calls'
Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/accidents/20-mishaps-maybe-caused-nuclear-war.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_warfare
That's a different episode.