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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
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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
Only if it has arms.
"When people stop fighting battles for themselves war becomes nothing more than a game." -- Quatre
I think war would be declared when Canada makes an attack on USA. Does it really matter that an act of war is carried out during a war?
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.
It qualifies as an "arm" (armament). It's useful in war. So yes, you do.
But good luck trying to enforce it, in an environment where the legal system has only occasionally given it even lip service since 1938.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
Yes
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...
Your shell. Give it to me
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
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?