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Robot Warfare Going Open Source
destinyland writes "Peter Singer, author of the new book Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, says 'You can build your own version of the Raven drone, which is a widely used military drone, for about $1,000.' Singer argues that 'just like software, warfare is going open source.' He warns that, ultimately, robot warfare may even expand beyond the military using more DIY and off-the-shelf systems. In addition to 43 countries now working on military robots, there are 'non-state actors ranging from Hezbollah to this militia group in Arizona to a bunch of college kids at Swarthmore... One person's hobby — such as the hobbyist who flew a homemade drone from North America to Great Britain — can be another person's terrorist strike option.'"
Quick, someone embed the three laws in the linux kernal.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
You can build your own version of the Raven drone, which is a widely used military drone, for about $1,000.
You mean this? Raven Drone. Umm.. maybe you could build the airframe for under $1000.. or at least something that looks like it. I seriously doubt you could get the radio control equipment, let alone the camera or milspec GPS receivers (which cost $10k each and you have to justify why you want them and promise not to export them).
If the book is as accurate as this interview, I think I'll just read fiction.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Just so I understand, hasn't anyone been able to buy / build a model aeroplane for the past few decades and possibly attach a camera or weapons to it? The only difference now is that they can go a little further - I guess.
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
If somebody makes a killbot without a pre-programmed kill limit then how will we ever defeat them?
Earlier we was all freaked about a guy wanting to make a UAV for pictures and now we need to code the 3 laws in the Linux Kernel?
I just cant keep up with this place, I swear....
I can't believe people can actually ask these questions with a straight face. It's like we've all forgotten how a military dictatorship works.
Ya don't invade your neighboring country to kill everyone (ok, maybe you do if you're in Africa).. you invade your neighboring country to dominate them, remove their ability to fight back, then take control of their government and their media and rule them. That's why, in this day and age, the first thing to go in a war would be access to the Internet. If you can control everything a dominated people see and hear then you can easily convince them that they are better off following you than fighting you. When dissenting opinions are quashed the masses quickly fall into line.
So what are wars about? They're about stopping an invader from controlling the information. Even in our highly digital world you still need to have physical dominance over a country to maintain that kind of control. If people can freely travel across borders then they can bring with them information which you can't control. So you build a wall.. and put guards on it to shoot anyone who tries to cross without your permission. You build an air force and shoot down any planes that try to come into your airspace. Same for a navy and the coastline.
Wars are not "competitions". You don't send your most strapping men to kill their most strapping men, in the snappiest uniforms you can design, and then do a body count to determine the winner. You win by controlling the terms that everyone uses to refer to what happened. The war isn't over when everyone stops fighting. If you are seen as a "liberator" who is now fighting "insurgents" then the war is over.. you won.
War is ugly. It's the ugliest thing there is. Cause it's not about killing them.. it's about forcing your point of view down their throat.
How we know is more important than what we know.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/04/1054406219113.html I saw a doco on this guy, last I heard he was about to be buried by the NZ Gov at the request (insistence?) of the US Gov. Poor bastard, you'd think some defence contractor would recruit him and have him build them low-cost rockets to sell to Pakistan or something.
the war ends with the victor robots causing horrific casualties among the civilian populations on the other side.
c&c wont result in mass civilian casualties or the resulting end to the war.
The "open source" part is a little silly, but the "anybody can use technology in inovative ways to harm others" part is very reasonable
Seriously. Think about any world leader/other person in the world. If you didn't care about getting caught, don't you think you could engineer something to make them wind up dead?
given the resources available today (especially the internet), it's not that far-fetched
As such, robot engineers will rule the world, make robot women to serve us, and put freakin lasers on sharks.
Don't you suddenly want to change career?
In the early morning of 2014 December 7, one million mechanized soldiers ascend from the receding tide and onto the shores of China. The robots march relentlessly westward, killing all Chinese in their path.
The final destination is Tibet.
In the words of that old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! Buddha, Almighty! Free at last!".
I think you're talking about Cyber Warfare, which I agree is a great way to end a war.
However the article here is about Robot Warfare, mostly unmanned machines engaging in battles.
My question is still the same -- If we want safety of the Three Laws, how do we, in your word, dominate the enemy with these robots?
You can have Ravens flying overhead all day, but if it's not going to destroy lives, it can hardly achieve anything, it can't even destroy buildings with lives in them.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Just great, who wants to bet that the DHS will make a "No buying aerial plane kits" because they can be "terror weapons"? And of course everyone will have to register their model airplanes. And consent to a search of their home if they own one.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I read that book. I think it was even reviewed on Slashdot already.
One thing that's surprised me is that nobody in the Third World has built something like a V-1 "buzz bomb". That's WWII technology, and it was a low-end technology back then, built from sheet metal. Just duplicating the V-1, adding a JATO bottle so you can use a short portable launch ramp, and adding a half-decent autopilot would provide a precision cruise missile capability at a low price. A low-end GPS plus a backup capability to revert to compass and time in case of jamming would work.
Most of them will get through, especially if they each take different routes. The original V-1s flew in a straight line from launch site to target, the launch sites were fixed, and the target was usually London, so shooting them down wasn't hard. It took thousands of anti-aircraft guns, though. Who deploys thousands of anti-aircraft guns any more?
Whether or not you believe in this "singularity" stuff, it's obvious that the progress of technology in general constantly makes building improvised weapons like this (and weapons in general) easier. It also makes defending against such threats easier, but it'll always be more expensive to defend than attack (especially if we want to protect things which we currently feel are basic rights like freedom of expression and privacy).
I hope we don't get to the point where random people in NZ (link copied from another post) can build WMDs from parts ordered over the Internet quicker than humanity manages to prove that intelligence is useful for long-term species survival.
If personal military robots are the wave of the future, what will this mean for 2nd amendment issues? Will there be a movement to protect a citizen's right to run their own robot militias?
Yes, I ignored your 3 laws question.. sorry. I thought it was too silly to warrant a response. Obviously no-one who makes armed robots for warfare is going to make them 3 laws safe (quite apart from the fact that it was a literary device, sheesh).
It's simple, as robot technology matures, armed robots will appear on the battlefield.. they will be programmed to determine friend from foe and carry out specific missions. Maybe it will indeed be like playing a game of C&C.. but that's irrelevant.. you asked what the point was of that. I told you what the point is; specifically, you use your robot army to kill their robot army, and then their regular army, then anyone that resists, so the people who are cowering in fear will believe what you tell them.
This isn't some new "Cyber Warfare" idea. This is what wars are about, it's what they've always been about.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Read again. He's not talking about electronic warfare. He's talking about good old-fashioned crushing military dictatorship.
Your kilo of Purple Shishkaberry will be making its final approach to your back yard in approximately 3 minutes. Please ensure that no cats, dogs, children or uniformed officials are blocking the runway. Thank you for choosing Aer Lungus, the micro-airline that gets you high by getting your cargo high. Please remember that we offer a volume discount for frequent fliers.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The guy who posted this is reading.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
Conquering gods their titles take from foes they captive make.
-White Goddess
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
When you think of the money and time we're pouring into ways to kill folks off, and compare that to what it'd cost to relieve poverty and chaos, it's just tragic.
That's WWII technology
...that was used exclusively by probably the most technologically advanced country at the time, where it had a cadre of top notch scientists to design the weapons and the resources of a nation to build and launch them in sufficient numbers to get noticed.
We have come a long way in the past 60 years, but building rockets is still, well, rocket science. Why bother when you can strap 20 pounds of explosives to a zealous follower and buy em' a bus ticket?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
So how come the West lost in Iraq?
I don't therefore I'm not.
You're kind of an idiot, aren't you. What does anyone have to gain by 'ruling' but a headache. Wars are about many more things than whether coke is better than pepsi. Why don't you review some wars for us and tell us exactly what points of view were being forced. If you intend to paint wars fought for 'freedom' as if freedom were a mere point of view, then you really are an idiot.
So...the Soviets defeated the Nazis by controlling the semiotics of the situation? Napoleon won because he could control what the Austrian press told its readers? Come on man, that stuff doesn't fly in the real world.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The Nazis invaded their neighbors to reform the greater Germany. The ideology was simply that all these neighboring countries are full of Germans who are suffering under the tyranny of non-German governments. If you'd studied history at all you'd know that. If the people inside these countries had thought of the Nazis the same way the allies did, the war would have been over pretty quickly (btw, it wasn't). "The resistance" wasn't a lot of people.. it wasn't the majority.. it was a small bunch of rebels. If Germany had won the war you'd be referring to them as terrorists.
How we know is more important than what we know.
He still seems to be around since he is still blogging on his website www.aardvark.co.nz
Old news. robocode!
robot.rotate(90);
robot.rotateGun(-45);
robot.fire(3);
robot.doVictoryDance();
blog.idigitall.com
Does NZ count as the third world?
Bruce Simpson (http://aardvark.co.nz) built a cruise missile half a decade ago and nearly sold it to the yanks
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/missilemanbook.shtml
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
Lets not forget the other common reason to go to war:
- Being faced with internal dissent and a real possibility of loosing power, portray another nation (or even a minority within your own nation) as "the Enemy" and go to war against them, thus distracting the masses from your own faults as leader, rallying them against somebody else and having a convenient excuse to take on "state of emergency"-like powers which then can be use against your personal internal enemies.
This technique is as widely used in tin-pot-dictatorships as in "democracies" *cough* war on terror *cough*
wrong. you kill people until the remaining ones are too scared to fight back or happy with the status quo.
the bush era is over, return under the rock you lived before with your delusion of a clean war for the control of the information
Robot warfare is not going Open Source! If you want to take out somebody remotely, it is sufficient to build a torpedo, a guided missile, or a mine.
Anybody remember Bruce Simpson's DIY cruise missile? Bruce Simpson has shown that you can build all of this using standard components of today.
I hope the government will not severely restrict science in this area as well (just think about what happened to nuclear research). The path to industrial automation and robotics already has enough hurdles (proprietary software, patented standards and machines, vendor lock-in, lack of integration, weak theoretical foundation, ...).
I came across this the other day on stumbleupon, makes for interesting reading. I think the author is overplaying a fair bit (and the site itself has a horrible color scheme to see the links), but it is filled with some wikipedia articles I'd never seen before and some really interesting discussion about how humans would fight against a Skynet scenario.
It will be a great time, when the average 15 year old cracker noob can crack a whole army of bots, and turn them against their master. It's no longer a powerful government against a helpless you. Power becomes equalized. You do not need big money or big industries, to get big power anymore. You only need brains. Lotsa lotsa brains! ^^
And don't think any military leader acts any wiser than those 15 year olds would. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
umm.. I believe I said exactly that. And went on to say how terrible war is. Check your reading comprehension, it's down.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Wake me when I can build a Raven Mech.
Because very few genuinely believed we were "liberating" them. And those who did still complain about the time it's taken, the costs, the death...
We "Won" in that we achieved what the politicians and string-pullers set out to do. We "Lost" because it cost too much over too long, in both material assets and human lives.
Really? The west lost in Iraq? When did that happen? I hadn't realized that the insurgents had control of the government, means of production and distribution. I also hadn't realized that the US military (and lets face it, they are really the only nation with a fighting force still there) couldn't bring in more material and armed troops to just about any where in the nation. I must be really behind in my news.
well said
I don't therefore I'm not.
Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the parliamentary and fully democratic government of Lebanon - chosen freely by the people.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
What's the point of fighting wars with robots if they are to follow the three laws?
I wish like hell people would actually read his books before they quote them. If you had actually read his books you wouldn't be asking the question in the first place. The entire point of his books are how flawed and ambiguous those three laws are. In short, anyone intending to create robots which are governed by Asimov's three laws of robots are either stupid - or well - stupid.
Looks like a great iPhone app...
The book is supposed to be really good. The author has published a video on TED.com (an excellent source for the inquiring mind - lectures by scientists)
This should have been included in the article:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_war.html
GO TO TED.COM and open your mind!!
I've seen the TAM (Trans-Atlantic-Model), I've seen the CCCongress's lecture on paparazzi. I would also have to conclude that if someone has a couple thousand dollars and the time, that you could build a cruise missile. Don't lie to yourselves, If I wanted to bomb Japan for shutting down my factory here in the states, I probably could do it. And that dumb ass N.Korean president is throwing so much effort into that nuke program... How sad. "Yay, I'm going to be a mass murderer."
If you want just to build an autonomous airplane model, you don't need military-grade GPS.
Civilian GPS receivers have hard limits to avoid being used in DIY missile guidance systems. They refuse to output a reliable answer when simultaneously above a certain altitude AND above a certain speed threshold.
Since you're not going to hit both of these limits with an air plane model, the commercial GPS are going to be enough.
Also I have a couple of friends who had very good success while recording movies from their (radio-controlled, not autonomous) using dead cheap webcams.
Similar creation (autonomous plane model with GPS and Camera) has already been done in the past, and even mentioned on /. (Can't manage to find the link. Was a balloon-started autonomous glider, with a radio-link to transmit pictures to DOS powered laptop)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Where are my mod points when I need them? Mod parent up
"Winning" and "losing" are pretty ill-defined and subjective terms.
We "won" in the sense that we kicked out the old regime and replaced it with one of our choice. We "lost" in that there was a large insurgency and civil war which essentially ended up settling itself, determining the state of the country going forward. We also "won" in that we now have strategic influence over an important Middle Eastern state, and also "lost" in that it was at a rather horrific civilian death toll and level of collateral damage.
When you ask someone if you "won or lost", it depends entirely on the criteria used to judge.
FYI, I use "we" in the loosest possible sense here as I have absolutely no involvement in the war one way or the other, and did not support it.
Whew, the D.O.D. UAV's are scary. The Taliban are now starting to think they're missing out, so they've started their own Sky Net, yawn. The one enemy that every single human has is, "Chores". Armies would rather kill each other than, take out the Trash, Paint the Fence, or stop watching the game to help out. My solution is to build a machine that will Vacuum, put things back in their place, wash dishes, mop, take out the trash, cook(without burning), and recharge using solar, and wind. After this product hits the market, men will finally be able to watch the World Cup without having to bothered when they're asked to "help out with dinner". Mu-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha
The Nazis weren't terrorists, they were an elected government with a regular uniformed army. The Germans lost the war and we still don't refer to them as terrorists. You're arguing against yourself, and losing.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
yeah, good to see he's managed to avoid the spooks and get back to making cool things whizz through the air