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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.'"
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.
Yeah, they've got a few glitches, but you should see what they have to go through to make the legacy system they're replacing work. You're talking years of training, each unit.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
Coming soon to a battlefield near you, EMP weapons.
And it isn't as though the fleshy ones are without glitches of their own.
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.
the cell phone does not 'think'. I meant AI when I said it.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
You don't know what you mean when you say "think," then. I take it you got your ideas of "AI" from sci-fi movies, rather than from the computer science classroom.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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
That's the most "moving goalposts" definition of something I've read all day. You do realize that chess used to be (relatively) easy for humans, and extremely hard for computers, and nowadays, you can download free chess programs that run on commodity computers and can be all but the most exceptional human chess players? When computers can do something that was hard for them before, and then it becomes commonplace for computers to do it, is it no longer AI?
Please, tell us a substantial definition if you have problems with how everyone is using the term. This weird subjective thing you've presented has no place as a CS definition.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.