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How the Pentagon's Robots Would Automate War
rossgneumann writes: Pentagon officials are worried that the U.S. military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating robots capable of becoming fighting machines. A 72-page document throws detailed light on the far-reaching implications of the Pentagon's plan to monopolize imminent "transformational advances" in biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence, information technology, nanotechnology, and energy.
Why are people so quick to go to the sci-fi stories of the army of robots rising up to destroy humanity when there's still ample room for exploration of the robot's masters subjugating Earth to their will (a far likelier prospect, to boot?)
Weak. Cliché.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
What's even weaker is Slashdot's support for UTF-8.
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You do realize that "stabilize the Middle East" is a combined euphemistic phrase for "control oil " "maintain the petrodollar" and "keep Israel safe".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Not when both sides built their hardware out of Chinese parts.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
THANK GOODNESS the Chinese haven't shown themselves capable of hacking our military's systems!
#DeleteChrome
In the "news" (not in fact), there was a claimed missile gap between the US and the USSR. This blew up (pun intended) just before the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, and helped Kennedy get elected. Kennedy blamed Nixon, who was Vice President during the previous Eisenhower administration, of being responsible for this failure.
In fact, the estimates about the number of Soviet ICBMs were grotesquely exaggerated.
So they were claiming over a hundred in two years, while the real number at the time was four.
In Kubricks's film Dr. Strangelove, this was parodied as a mineshaft gap
So in a time of shrinking budgets, when a Pentagon general gets up on a podium and screams "were falling behind, we need more money NOW!!!", maybe you should examine his claims very carefully. The Pentagon is not exactly a disinterested party. There is a lot of recent history suggesting he might not be right.
Why is Snark Required?
... where will the incentive for peace come from?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"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."
You can't handle the truth.
Or you know, we could just try being peaceful with each other.
You don't have to sell peace to the common man. However, nothing concentrates money and power like a good war, so those up top calling the shots are always good for another conflict.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Sorry Bill, but this time you seem to be off mark. As a percentage of the federal budget, "Defense" is some 17.7%, to which I would add the DHS and NSA, for a grand total of about 20%. That's not spare change.
When compared to the efficient way the other two agencies that command a large portion of the US budget (Health and SS) are run, it's hard to justify spending so much money on an endeavor so wasteful.
In the end, the US military adventures in the last few decades have put the country in a tough place. Some of the actions have been unjust and for that the US is loathed by quite a few, some other created the impression of the US being the World Cop, therefore many expect it to act at a finger snap (e.g. in Syria and I still remember the debacle over *not* intervening in Rwanda). In the long run, this is a losing situation, no matter how many resources are thrown at it.
I'm convinced that anything they say is "coming" is already here, but not declassified yet. Just look at all the different military aircraft models that were long rumored, with the establishment pinning the sightings on crazies and the fringe.
All this with high ranking officials opining that "we need a game-changing" technology is just the defence complex getting the pubic ready for a radical departure from the military status-quo, so that the reaction will be "Yay!", instead of "*Gasp!*".
Politically, there's not been a better opportunity for a long time. The Gulf Wars and their sequels were OK for unveiling some fairly mundane tech, but the highly dedicated, but low-tech opposition found in those theatres weren't sufficient to create the requisite fear at home. It takes the Russian threat (which has been helped along by the West's strategically botched actions in Ukraine) to get people sufficiently anxious to be ready to receive some truly game-changing military tech with open arms. (Oops, no pun intended there.)
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
Or, to paraphrase dear old Stalin, quantity is a quality all of its own.
Good luck sneaking up on a robot with 360 degree sensors and flipping a switch that's probably behind a locked panel when it's in combat mode. Or give commands to a robot that only takes digitally signed orders with a chain of trust all the way to a root key deep in a vault somewhere in the US, verified in hardware and tamper-proofed so you'll with 99.999% probability will break it before you can circumvent the signature validation. And even then they probably have unique single use kill codes to stop a malfunctioning robot. Assuming it won't just blow itself up rather than be captured, at least the essential bits. Sure you can take the physical parts like guns and fire manually, but I doubt you'll ever get much working software and without that you're still a man against a robot army that's totally indifferent to both your and their losses.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"Uh, drop it on a large city? Stupid..."
Oh, yes, of course, silly me! If only it wasn't the case that more than 90% of the population were not in the six biggest cities, including dad Stalin and his war train, or if they showed during the war to be the kind of people that would surrender after destroying some cities...