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Not Quite a T-1000, But On the Right Track
New submitter misanthropic.mofo writes with a look at the the emerging field of robtic warfare. Adding, "Leaping from drones, to recon 'turtlebots', humanity is making its way toward robo-combat. I for one think it would make it interesting to pit legions of robot warriors against each other and let people purchase time on them. Of course there are people that are for and against such technology. Development of ethical robotic systems seems like it would take some of the fun out of things, there's also the question of who gets to decide on the ethics."
Either I'm not the geek I thought I was, or you, sir, are not. What is a T-100? Did you mean T-1000?
One of us is turning in their geek card tonight.
So, perhaps the next cold war will be fought in bunches of skirmishes between the US and China in Third World countries using flying, land and water robots to protect small numbers of imported humans controlling large numbers of worker robots, rather like when ants go to war angainst each other and the first one to take over the other's nest and larvae becomes the winner while the losers scatter.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Am I the only one who misread as "...it interesting to pit pigeons..."? I was just thinking jeez, can't we just leave birds alone? First sparrows, now pigeons?
Hello - robotics researcher here (specialising in UAVs). I wonder when these breathless articles about battlefield robotics will end. There is nothing new about battlefield robots - we've had tomahawk missiles since the early 80s. It's just that these days we think about them as robots rather than as cruise missiles. Drone strikes? What about the missile strikes from the Gulf War? They were the champions of good and (along with stealth technology) the gold hammer of the Forces of Good.
The only thing that has changes is more penetration of robots into our militaries and more awareness of some of the ethical considerations of automated weapons. Don't forget - the machine gun and landmine have killed far more people than drones likely ever will. They kill mindlessly so long as the trigger was pulled or they are stepped on. And yet, their ethical considerations were long debated. It's just that "omg a robot!" is headline magic.
(To whit - the author of this article must not know that much about robotics if they're claiming "The turtlebot could reconnoitre a battlesite". No it can't - it's a glorified vacuum cleaner. I just kicked the one in my lab. It can barely get over a bump in the carpet.)
Let's focus on the real ethics of robotic warfare: how our leaders choose to use the tools we have made.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
... a 2nd Amendment right to own a combat robot?
Billions of dollars can be deactivated by a simple PEM.
You know... the bombs that emits an electro-magnetic pulse that disables everything that are digital...
They are so simple to build that USA would restrain itself from use them, as the enemy would easily figure out how to build one by analyzing the bomb's scraps...
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Let's say Canada creates an army of robots and drones then makes them attack the USA. Would taking out a foreign robot be an act of war? Would Canada spin it in such a way that it made the robot look innocent and the American as the aggressor? Would the natives have a lot less moral qualms about destroying a machine compared to a real human?
You can change the name of the countries there, but there are some questions about taking robots to war.
"When people stop fighting battles for themselves war becomes nothing more than a game." -- Quatre
Is that like Roblimo warfare, only sexier?
People have been ethical "robots" (military) of their "robotical overloards" (current rulers / hirers/ whatever) since time immemorial. If you wish your "ethics" in war, go to war. Otherwise, it's a videogame. And you should be dis-empowered. If you are "in charge" of these "robotic warriors", you should have your own "ass"ets at risk. Otherwise, don't bother. If you are "commander in chief", you should have served, E-4 or below, before commanding. Otherwise, not allowed. If you vote "go to war", you should be REQUIRED to report to the nearest recruiting station for immediate deployment to Wherever-stan. If you wish to vote, you must first deploy to Wherever-stan or be legal resident. If you're so darned proud of that you show flags in your windshield and bumperstickers, GO BACK THERE. Otherwise, sign-up, shoulder-up, pay-up, and get on with life. That is exactly what "they", the American fore-fathers offered, in their Declaration and Constitution.
Security. Safety. Freedom. Pick one.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
There are only so many hours in the day. If we put those hours into finding new ways to kill other people and win conflicts, we will not be putting those hours into finding new ways to heal people and resolve conflicts. Langdon Winner talks about this topic in his writings when he explores the notion of whether artifacts have politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
Albert Einstein wrote, after the first use of atomic weapons, that everything had changed but our way of thinking. You make some good points about us long having cruise missiles, but on "forces of good", here is something written decades ago by then retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler: ..."
http://www.warisaracket.com/
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Just because it was "hot" before, with cruise missiles and nukes and poison gases, does not mean we will be better off when our society reaches a boiling point -- with robotic soldiers and military AIs and speedier plagues and so on. Eventually quantitative changes (like lowering prices per unit) become qualitative changes. Every year our planet is in conflict is a year of risk of that conflict escalating into global disaster. So, the question is, do our individual actions add to that risk or take away from it?
I'm impressed with what some UAVs can do in terms of construction vs. destruction, so obviously there is a lot of different possibilities in that field.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/107217-real-life-constructicon-quadcopter-robots-being-developed
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
... obviously! Some things will never change.
...again those who would enslave them as guards and soldiers? http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/TheRightsofRobots.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
... I for one think it would make it interesting to pit legions of robot warriors against each other...
it's been done. According to the all-wise wikipedians, "Storm 2" was the last world-champ.
"What are you doing here, Elijah?"
Of course there are people that are for and against such technology.
They should find something else to occupy themselves with because the technology will happen regardless. As long as we have a world of competing nation states (generally a good thing) if one doesn't develop a technology to its full military potential, another one will. Even nuclear weapons are slowly but surely proliferating despite major technological difficulties and the most intensive legal/diplomatic etc efforts ever made to prevent any device from being made.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
> there's also the question of who gets to decide on the ethics
Yes. If only there was a body of work, say an entire branch of philosophy, dedicated to defining what ethics are, based on rigorous rational thinking and an axiomatic approach.
Ethics are NP Hard, good luck with that.
An HK-Aerial is refered to a wide variety of Skynet's large airborne VTOL-capable Non-Humanoid Hunter Killer. Derived from the original HK-Drone, it retains the form and maneuver system but on a much larger scale. With wingspans of up to 108 feet[1] and a devastating array of under-slung and wing mounted lasers, missiles, and plasma cannons, the HK-Aerial is fearsome and terrifying to behold.
Ye gods,
your brains have really been poisoned by Hollywood if you think that a title mentioning the T-1000 is apposite after reading that pile of garbage on the BBC site OP pointed to.
Google 'Second Variety', or, if you really cant live without a movie point of reference, 'Screamers'. (and even then, these are pushing it)
If only the "Am I the only idiot who misread 'blah' as 'bhal'??" posts would cease! Learn to read. You are lazy or dyslexic or both.
Wars don't end because either (or both) of the sides are tired of committing atrocities.
Wars end because either (or both) of the sides can't sustain its own casualties.
See Iraq. See Vietnam.
Robot soldiers mean that atrocities can take place with no human toll, no witnesses.
No battle fatigue.
Robots will do to war what Facebook did to idle chat...
(How about that?)
The depth and razor-sharp incisiveness of this analysis leaves me breathless.
Add a quote from a taxi driver in Beirut and it could be Thomas Friedman under a pseudonym.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
"Development of ethical robotic systems seems like it would take some of the fun out of things"
What kind of twisted fantasy world are you guys living in? War means killing people. It isn't fun. It isn't a video game. And in response to Kell's comment above, we aren't the "Forces of Good" battling the "Forces of Evil". We are a nation state with imperfect leaders and selfish short-sighted goals just like every other nation state on the planet. The difference between having real armies and having robot armies is that robots don't suffer any decline in morale from massacring large numbers of civilians. Think about the implications of that for a minute.
You know it's coming.... People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots - they'll be showing up and throwing motor oil on fans.
Will sentient robots get the right to bear arms...
We've got some breathing space to think about it as strong AI or AGI doesn't seem much closer than it was 30 years ago.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
We are in a really bad spot if you think wars are "fun". Wars are bad and are supposed to stay that way. Just give one country a disproportionate budget to build battle robots and human being on the other side will die like flies... without even the inconvenience of pulling the trigger, no risk, nor seeing the blood, nor living with the remorse (don't have to worry about war crimes either right? We can at most talk about a regrettable malfunction). Just a permanent, very profitable war industry fighting wherever for no real cause and people comfortable at home, oblivious to the real suffering. Sounds familiar?
So, war as either as a commodity, as a business or as entertainment, I can't even tell which one is more wrong.
The same people who always do - those with no ethics, who serve the 1% and never let anyone stand in the way of their greed and bloodlust. We are doomed.
And in the rainy season if they are on soft ground they can get washed downhill to another place - even if their location was recorded in the first place (not always the case by locals or superpowers).
A friend in Cambodia says this is a real problem in hilly areas, dirt roads are cleared and then after heavy rains you have to assume the road to the next town might be live with UXO again and has to be checked before you can drive out again.
Stuff that was dropped/ planted in 1975 is still killing people.
"AI" has always been that which AI can't do. Here are several activities that once were considered sci-fi-level AI but are no longer considered AI in a broad sense because we know how to do them more-or-less:
* Looking stuff up for us (Google);
http://www.google.com/
* Inferring questions from examples and answering questions posed in natural language (IBM's Watson);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)
* Generating hypotheses and doing hands/grippers-on scientific experiments (Adam);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Scientist
* Reading text in multiple fonts reliably and quickly and cheaply;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
* translating one human language to another on the fly;
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.uit.innovation.html/
http://www.gizmag.com/go/1833/
* reading and translating signs;
http://questvisual.com/us/
* Making portraits;
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2012/11/tresset_robot_artist_artist_engineers_robots_to_make_art_and_save_his_own.single.html
* Playing the piano including from sheet music;
http://www.synthgear.com/2009/music-misc/synth-playing-robot/
http://gizmodo.com/5963137/watch-this-adorable-horde-of-intelligent-swarm-robots-play-piano
* Driving a car in busy traffic (Google, Stanford, CMU, others);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2007_Urban_Challenge
* Winning chess games (IBM's Deep Blue and pretty much any PC now against a mid-level player);
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess
* Image recognition for quality control in factories;
http://www.general-vision.com/products/mtvs.php
* Recognizing faces;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_recognition_system
* Figuring out the name of a musical composition from a few notes as well as making new compositions and dynamic accompaniments;
http://www.wikihow.com/Identify-Songs-Using-Melody
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_and_artificial_intelligence
* The diagnostic aspect of being a doctor (Watson again);
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/11/ibm-watson-medical-doctor
* Investing in volatile financial markets;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_trading
* Serving as a sentry with a machine gun;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5YftEAbmMQ
* Twirling a cell phone;
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
* Identifying things by smell;
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Probably won't be a post that gets scored up, but I came very close to saying "dupe post". I know I saw this article yesterday or Sunday with the exact same headlines. After spending 20 minutes digging through Slashdot archives, and digging through all other news sites I have read in the past couple of days, it finally occured to me that I saw this in the Firehose yesterday. Oops.
It's unlikely that the US military will do another ground war until they have a reasonably effective infantry-assisting robot presence. Dealing with house-to-house conflict and IEDs is really expensive in lives, and a real cost in American lives damages the political party that starts the war. However, once the military is equipped with robots which can assist in that kind of combat, it overturns a lot of the pre-existing political balance points. It's going to lead to a lot of trouble which could have been avoided with an early moratorium on combat robotics.
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/bigdeal/the-second-amendment-in-iraq-combat-robotics-and-the-future-of-human-liberty-820
The US military is working very hard on robots to assist in the kind of house-to-house combat they have been involved in during Iraq and Afghanistan. In that kind of conflict, there are a lot of casualties and that puts massive pressure on the politicians back home. The pressure is delayed, but very real.
However, once they get robots which can assist in that kind of conflict, it completely unbalances the US Constitution by essentially removing the Second Amendment: effective combat robots are equivalent to gun control. I think that has some very serious implications.
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/bigdeal/the-second-amendment-in-iraq-combat-robotics-and-the-future-of-human-liberty-820
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Make EMP bombs for Anti-Tyranny kit.
I for one think it would make it interesting to pit legions of robot warriors against each other
Would be nice if the attacking robots would target only defending robots, but why would they? They will always target the Humans that are important for the enemy, otherwise the war would be pointless.
The difference between a graphing calculator and a time-traveling, shape-shifting death bot is one bit...
This is an easy one.
The people will decide what is ethical, and the politicians will ignore it.
There are valid points all around.
Technology goes forward, and anything that gets in the way of the wheel of progress gets run over. Even if we were to stop all research on this technology, other's won't, and so we must go forward in order to prepare for them.
Far more lethal than the terminator(s), these machines can have a kill ration close to 100% and do so in a fraction of the time. No trained soldier could dodge an attack from one of these monsters.
Where their is a power to reduce civilian deaths, there is also the power to corrupt and use for evil which always happens. It;s only a matter of time til these things kill hundreds or even thousands, and the politicians simply say they malfunctioned.
The world is definately going to a dark place.
The Series 1 Terminator, also known as T-1, is the first Terminator class robot to be produced by Cyber Research Systems. Designed for extreme combat, the Series 1 was built to clear battlefields of enemy troops with its powerful weaponry.
The T-1 was originally built in limited numbers, each individually numbered and stored under individual anti-static dust coverings. Cyberdyne created this first-generation fully autonomous ground offensive system in 2003 as part of their program to re-create the work of the late Dr. Miles Bennett Dyson.
http://terminator.wikia.com/wiki/Series_T1
In 2007, three SWORDS units were deployed to Iraq. Each unit is armed with a M249 machine gun. This deployment marks the first time that robots are carrying guns into battle;[2] however, their weapons have remained unused as the Army has never given the go-ahead for using them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON
Your shell. Give it to me
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I'm less worried about robots deciding who to kill on their own than I am by the reduction in the number of humans that have to make that decision. Imagine if someone in power in your country decided they wanted to be dictator - think how many people they would have to convince to make it stick. They would need a chain of command all the way from Generals willing to give the orders, down to Privates willing to pull the trigger on their own countrymen, and it would have to be pretty broad in terms of numbers as well, or they'd be wiped out by forces that remained loyal to the present system. Not to say it can't be done, it can and has in the past, but it's an important obstacle to any would-be tyrant.
Now think how "robots" and drones affect that number. The more automated, the more powerful, the more autonomous they are, the less people are needed to run the show. If your military ever comes down to a giant fleet of semi-autonomous robots run by a couple of rooms worth of gamers, democracy is done. It would (will?) be trivial to maneuver a few key supporters into the right places.
I'd like to see a doomsday clock that counts down the number of warm bodies standing between the status quo and dictatorship - obviously it'd be an estimate, but as this sort of technology advances, the number's getting smaller all the time.
Second Variety is available via the Gutenberg project: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32032
I read it as a kid and it totally creeped me out.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
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