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India To Develop Military Robots For Warfare
WoodenKnight writes "Indian DRDO chief Avinash Chander has told reporters that development of robotic soldiers would be one of his 'priority thrust areas', saying that 'unmanned warfare in land and air is the future of warfare.' He foresees robotic soldiers assisting human soldiers initially but, he hinted at forward-position deployment of such robots. He gave a timeline of at least a decade for the project to see any practical use but said a number of labs in India are now working on this."
If you have well-developed robotics expertise already, you're in a much better position to develop more specialized robots, like robot soldiers. India doesn't really: both its robotics industry and its research are relatively small sectors at the moment, far behind the state of the art in countries like Japan, China, Germany, South Korea, or the USA. They're going to have to fix that before robot soldiers are going to emerge out of it.
Of course, this might just be a way of selling robotics funding, so maybe that's the goal.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Will the robots be able to handle their own tech support should they have an issue?
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
"Hello, this is Fred who-is-definitely-not-from-Hyderabad, thank you for calling killbot technical support, how can I help you today?"
"Hi Fred, I'm afraid my killbot has been refusing all targeting instructions and attempting to kill me."
"Ah, let me check with my supervisor, one moment please."
"Thank you for your patience. Please try turning it off and never turning it on again."
Very surprised. Though no country wants to risk the lives of their soldiers, only in the USA soldiers in body bags have such a heavy political price. India being a Democracy it too would pay a higher political price than, may be Pakistan and China. But still it is a highly populated country without draft. In fact, even in the USA, after the draft has been removed and it became an all volunteer armed forces, the political cost of returning body bags have dropped a lot. So why robots in the forward firing lines? May be it is posturing, goading Pakistan into spending its money on robots instead of supplying terrorists with cheap AK-47s.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
..are doomed to repeat it.
Ok so this will likely lead to robot vs robot warfare with no real human casualties... So, I say we put that shit on TV and enjoy :) /joke /sarcasm
Nah, I don't see any way for this to escalate badly
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I wish I didn't have to put tags for people who don't get humour.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
...so only those that abide by the treaty won't have them.
Like it or not, this is the future.
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.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Almost true. It's about resources. Machines get to fight for their own oil, for example. Too bad there are probably humans in the way.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The India population is 1.241 billion according to google. It would be hard press to find a cheaper alternative other than human soldier.
The US shares a border with it's biggest enemy. In fact, the US and it's biggest enemy are on the same side of the border.
rewriting history since 2109
I disagree. IMHO war has generally been about egos, and resources are frequently the excuse. Assuming we managed to come up with efficient and logical machines, they would most likely come up with some more efficient way to get their resources than war.
However if they were to decide that war was the most efficient way, watch out!
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I've always thought that a lot of people don't realize that having lives in harms way on -either- side of a is a deterrent in itself to using weapons that would be horribly beyond all conscience (that in itself, well, depends on who's pushing the buttons). India and Pakistan say, have nuclear weapons. If Pakistan had a few infantry and tank divisions, along with a couple border villages wiped out by robotic troops, I'd think that the bar would be lowered as to them responding with a tactical nuclear strike to eliminate the robot threat. Then things would snowball from there. The situation wouldn't go from escalating from conventional to chemical in between at all. War is about killing people. When one side has troops that are machines, the other side does not have to restrain themselves to the moral restraints that have kept whatever tenuous leash on us throughout our history. Just a thought.
...honestly, not even worth reporting.
1) India has trouble building tanks, airplanes, ships, and subs...far more 'pedestrian' tools of warfare. Their programs are bloated and rife with corruption, delays, technical failures, overpromises, etc. such that they are only capable of producing inferior equipment at ridiculous costs.
2) India is the second most populous country in the world. If there's anything they DON'T need it's to replace the dirt-cheap organic, self-replicating, minimally-functional dubious cannon fodder they currently have with hideously expensive, fragile, dubious cannon fodder made out of plastic and metal that they don't have and likely will never be able to build for the foreseeable future.
-Styopa
I mean, can you imagine an 8 armed robot? :-0