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Russia Wants To Send A Gun-Shooting Robot To The ISS (mashable.com)
"Just in time for the rise in global military tensions, Russian officials have released video that's sure to calm fears all around: a death dealing humanoid robot that shoots handguns." An anonymous reader quotes Mashable:
Posted to Twitter on Friday by Russia's deputy Prime Minister, Dmitry Rogozin, the video shows the country's space robot FEDOR (Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research) accurately shooting twin pistols in a scene chillingly similar to images from The Terminator. But rather than being displayed as a not-so-subtle warning to the entire human population of the planet, Rogozin instead claims via Facebook that it's just a demonstration of the robot's dexterity and use of algorithms to execute tasks.
CNET quotes Russia's deputy prime minister as saying "We are not creating a Terminator, but artificial intelligence that will be of great practical significance in a lot of spheres." Russia plans to deploy the robot on the International Space Station by 2021, Mashable reports, adding "Hopefully, the robot's arrival on the ISS will come sans life-snuffing weaponry, which is pretty much the opposite of the intent behind creating a peaceful international space station shared by the world's super powers in the first place."
CNET quotes Russia's deputy prime minister as saying "We are not creating a Terminator, but artificial intelligence that will be of great practical significance in a lot of spheres." Russia plans to deploy the robot on the International Space Station by 2021, Mashable reports, adding "Hopefully, the robot's arrival on the ISS will come sans life-snuffing weaponry, which is pretty much the opposite of the intent behind creating a peaceful international space station shared by the world's super powers in the first place."
Because the press gave a big yawn when they announced this
RoboGunslingers from Outerspace!
Humanity shall endure! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Prelude to hurling rocks from space?
In the video it was just shown holding some pistols and shooting them at some targets. Very little body movement, didn't walk anywhere. Looked like a locked down animatronic (hydraulic powered robot) from a theme park (I should know, I used to design them - theme parks).
While the reality of it might be much more impressive, I didn't see it on (this) video. However, there was a link on the page which led me to some official footage (after there was a leak) of Boston Dynamics' fantastic (and scary!) wheeled/legged robot. You've really got to see it:
http://mashable.com/2017/02/28...
Since Boston Dynamic's robot can apparently easily handle a 100lb. object, it wouldn't be too hard for it to wield a really serious gun. When A.I. becomes sentient we'd better hope that they're friendly. Anyway, if they could adapt this robot for zero-gee (replace the wheels with grappling hands? A tail? Like Doc Oc?) I would imagine it would be much more useful (and terrifying) on the ISS.
It's a silly mockup of a robot, with a couple of switches on the triggers. The things Boston Dynamics have been building are far more alarming than this. But leave it to dishonest russophobic websites to use this to make everyone fear the dangerous Russians.
...now cosmonauts have to worry about FEDOR's attitude and software glitches ?
What century are you living in ? Cruise missiles (which result in no casualties for their user) have been used without hesitation for decades in situations in which ground troops would not have been sent. Similarly bombing missions are carried out against ISIS precisely because they don't have the necessary anti-aircraft defenses. Same with the more modern UCAVs. Arms manufacturers invest heavily in the development of unmanned weapons because there are expensive and useful to politicians who want to be able to do something without having to deal with the families of dead soldiers. War has been easy for a long time. If troops are indispensable then it is a bit harder but not that much given the ridiculously disproportionate casualty numbers between sophisticated and unsophisticated armies.
Everything about that video looks fake. The "robot" doesn't even appear to move at all as targets fall at significant angles relative to it. And what's up with those bullet casings falling at the end which don't appear to correspond with anything actually happening at the time?
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
Cruise missiles and drone bombings do not substitute for ground troops. The GP is clearly talking about a robotic substitute for ground troops.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
Exactly, that sounds fine with me at first glance, as all participants in the ISS. As a matter of fact. the "I" stands for international.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
"Russia Wants To Send A Gun-Shooting Robot To The ISS "
Obviously a mistake, the last 's' has to be removed.
Can someone explain to me why a humanoid configuration would be the best form such a robot would come in? Seems so me that this form we have has some pretty severe downsides that can be accounted for if we had the opportunity to redesign us for military purposes. We fall over easily, have a hard time getting up, have limited locomotion options, have limited FOV, only two tool manipulating appendages with limited articulation and action range, don't float, can't jump good or fly, exposed compute/sensory hub, etc.. I'd go with a more octopus like configuration with for example six appendages with independent compute/sensory complexes, and that can be used for locomotion, recon, tool manipulation or just as backup looks nothing like a bipedal humanoid.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
sensationalized title lying by trying to get people believed Russia was sending an armed robot to space, when in fact it was just a tool that could, possible, fire a gun.
Could it be that much worse than the current ruling class?
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The ethical issue however is mostly the same. It push button warfare. One side can kill the other without facing death themselves. Machines still do the killing (whether a gun toting robot or shell on the end of a guided missile with an altitude trigger) at a remote site where there isn't a human been to look the other guy in the eyes and possible change its mind.
Consider the MOAB. We killed 36 ISIS 'fighters' were they all fighters or were two of them just guys ISIS grabbed and said "you'll be cooking our meals or we kill your family" those two hypothetical individuals are men who might have surrendered to ground troops when the position was eventually over run. Those are lives that might have been spared, instead they got incinerated like everyone else! Again this just my imagination it is probably more likely everyone of the guys hold up in those caves were committed Islamists determined to kill anyone standing in the way of their caliphate.
Maybe one day our or Russian 'terminators' will have capacity to capture or kill, hopefully by the time these are deployed in the field they will have enough visual recognition to see if someone is carrying what appears to be a firearm and shoot them and maybe not kill the the little girl carrying a bucket of water. That kind of target recognition is far from simple however. Maybe that isn't a bucket of water, maybe is a bucket of acid? Humans are somewhat good and figuring that stuff out, machines have a ways to go yet.
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We must actually be pretty close to being able to deploy remotely controlled ground infantry
I doubt it, I don't think we have anything that comes close to passing a military obstacle course. If you think of say an urban area and the task of the robot(s) is to secure a building it has to execute so many practical little details, just using a door handle is challenging outside the lab. The other big deal is stealth, if you look at the robots today most of them are quite loud with hydraulics and such so they couldn't sneak up on anyone. There's a reason all soldiers do hand signals and all that shit, if they just trampled in they'd be easy targets. Also jamming would be a big issue, it's not that hard to create a big noise generator that could be triggered by a trip wire or such. Outdoors a jamming device trying to bring down a drone makes you a big target to shoot at but in the basement of a building your robo-soldiers would be cut off without any easy means to restore contact. For sure robots could do more but I think we're dependent on humans in close proximity for quite some time to come.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There are basically three kinds of military robot which are useful today, walking bombs, flying drones, and cruise missiles. We are only building two out of three of these today. The kind we're not building (walking bomb) is not particularly susceptible to jamming; if you jam it, it just blows up. Once it's safely away from the operator, you can arm that functionality.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I can so see Yul Brynner being played by Putin and the robot playing itself in endless role-switched gunfights where the robot always loses because it's shooting blanks.
They mean "gun-firing robot". A "gun-shooting robot" is a robot that fires bullets at guns.
Consider the MOAB. We killed 36 ISIS 'fighters' were they all fighters or were two of them just guys ISIS grabbed and said "you'll be cooking our meals or we kill your family" those two hypothetical individuals are men who might have surrendered to ground troops when the position was eventually over run.
To be fair, the MOAB is totally awesome.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If you think of say an urban area and the task of the robot(s) is to secure a building it has to execute so many practical little details, just using a door handle is challenging outside the lab.
The Russians apparently solved the door handle problem a while back...
#DeleteChrome
We can't just have the robots sort tiny screws, can we? No we have to do Dirty Harry
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
To be fair, the MOAB is totally awesome.
I know you were being tong in cheek, but you are not wrong. It is awesome, that we can eliminate an enemy position without risking the lives our our service personnel!
I did not mean my post to suggest the right/moral course was to send ground troops into that mess of caves. I would have used the bomb too, honestly if the president ordered me to take out that position. I simply was observing that there is a moral hazard to push button war of any sort. It makes it an easier call to kill people when you know its none of your people that will be doing any of the dying.
There is always the potential for civilian casualties, especially with large impact remote weapons systems. The next question is what is a legitimate target. I don't think if you are fighting a war for example all civilians are really off limits in terms of targets. What about the guy working in the tire factory, or the oil field. You know his effort supports the war effort and he knows it too but is still working there, is he fair target? What about the farmer tending his wheat field? I would say yes! If taking out that facility means either sweeping it with ground forces and loosing American lives or bombing / sending in terminator unit and killing some 'enemy' non-combatants, better them than us, would be my call.
What more worries me is does all this stuff make it to easy to decide to go to war in the first place? I still think there is a fundamental question this nation has wrestled with since before our entry in WWI, should be fighting wars that don't relate to our immediate interests? or should we keep the blood off our hands, even when that means sitting by and allowing injustice and even atrocities to occur?
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...yeah.....not buying that. You'd have to be a moron to believe that.
What I take away from that video is that they're not-so-subtly courting further investment from the military in order to develop a way more lethal 'version 2'. And the military is going to jump on this .. expect them to succeed in getting further funding and ultimately, bulk orders. This trend is worrying and likely inevitable ... scoff now, I would not want to be facing down an army of these invading my jurisdiction after another decade or two's advancement of the tech (this will happen in our lifetimes). The 2nd Amendment could become an important defense against robot armies.
The "robot" doesn't even appear to move at all as targets fall at significant angles relative to it.
I think you failed to notice the fitted lasersights, which are an obvious giveaway as to the mechanism they're using for visual targeting, and given that, the only movement necessary is very small adjustments of the hands and perhaps lower arms.
What more worries me is does all this stuff make it to easy to decide to go to war in the first place?
It does, but it shouldn't. The standard should be "war means innocent little babies are going to die. Is this action worth it?" And the answer to that is almost always "no."
or should we keep the blood off our hands, even when that means sitting by and allowing injustice and even atrocities to occur?
Generally yes, we should keep the blood off our hands, because eventually if everybody decides they don't want blood on their hands the wars kind of stop.
Obviously it depends on what kind of ethics you practice. If you're a utilitarian or consequentialist then you're going to start trying to predict the future about how many people you're going to kill or how many people would have died otherwise. As a Catholic and therefore big on the deontological ethics I get to neatly sidestep the question by saying "killing is wrong and therefore don't do it."
Interesting, sort of releated: I just read a study titled Roman Catholic beliefs produce characteristic neural responses to moral dilemmas wherein the authors hooked up atheists and Catholics to MRI machines and asked them moral questions and showed there's a real difference in the thought processes and areas of the brains activated. Makes me wonder if we can never really agree on a common ethical system between the religious and the non-religious.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The kind we're not building (walking bomb) is not particularly susceptible to jamming; if you jam it, it just blows up. Once it's safely away from the operator, you can arm that functionality.
Until IS tricks you into sending it into a building full of civilians, that would be a PR nightmare. Basically it would be a very slow and impractical delivery mechanism after you've decided it's safe to blow it up. It's different when you don't give a shit about accidental or collateral damage, then you can just strap a stick of C4 to a RC toy and wire the detonator like a dead man's switch to make it a walking bomb. When you lose signal or turn it off it's going to blow up something.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Google is your friend
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That is interesting and it confirms neurologically what psychologists have suspected for a long time. Certain religions attract the "healthy minded." Which sounds nice but really isn't a value judgement. You could call it a certain tolerance for injustice if you will. The healthy minded individual says, "I am not responsible if I am not personally involved and things are not necessarily in my power to improve". Catholicism mostly falls into this line of thinking. Other people see an unjust situation and think, "I might not have anything to do with it directly and I might not be able to fix it; but I have a responsibility to try." This is more consistent with people attracted to mainline Protestantism. I don't know where your typical atheist might fall on the spectrum but I can see how elements of secular humanism philosophically might be attractive to that type of individual as a mainline Protestant myself, I don't find the day to day conduct of your typical secular humanist in conflict with our/my own view of what Christ like behavior would be.
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Cyberdyne didn't specifically set out to create a "kill all the humans" T-800 Terminator either, nor was it part of their 5-year plan to create an AI that would launch a nuclear war and destroy humanity. The "law of unintended consequences" and all; they DID deploy a few T-70 units before Judgement Day. It had no neural net processor. Being in space, though, it is very "iffy" if a T-800 (or any with a coltan exoskeleton) could survive re-entry. Tantalum has a melting point of 3,020C, re-entry could hit that. Tantalum is the primary metal pulled from "coltan", and is probably one of the main metals in the Terminator's hyperalloy structure.
The ethical issue however is mostly the same.
The ethical issues are exactly the same in every situation, and it does not matter if the killing is done with a rock in your hand, remotely by pulling the trigger on a gun, or remotely by pressing a button on a joystick.
Notice that the automation added by a robot is the same automation that was already added by a gun!
Airplanes and bombs are also the exact same type of automation.
A person decides to kill another person, and acts on it. That is the entire moral and ethical issue, and the technology used makes no difference.
When you read about a robot firing a gun, there is no change. Nobody said the robot is going to decide when the gun gets fired, that's like saying the string of a bow will decide when the arrow is released. Stop blaming the bow and take responsibility for your actions.
Obviously it depends on what kind of ethics you practice.
For a Buddhist it is fairly simple; did you use less violence than what you were trying to prevent others from using, and in the end did you reduce the overall level of suffering?
In the case of dropping the MOAB on a terrorist base, I think it clear that this passes Buddhist moral and ethical analysis. Killing 2 dozen people with a bomb is less violent than letting those people take over whole cities and murder a significant percent of the residents, which is what ISIS has done in other places. Also, being a remote location there was likely little additional or accidental suffering caused. Compare that to a single ISIS suicide bomber in a city!
It is true that angry words are best combated by kind words, and that minor violence sometimes requires angry words. In this way Buddhism teaches to use a lower level of violence than what you are trying to stop. However, that scale goes up to "total annihilation," and it is considered good to stop total annihilation even if requires partial annihilation. This is why some monks practice martial arts, even though they usually refuse to fight. You can stop a knife with a stick, if you know how. If you can stop a missile with a bullet, do it!
engineers
You're missing the engine part, all you have is an `eer.
A nothingeer does not an engineer make.
It doesn't matter if you have a laser sight (which, by the way, why would you use a visible laser?), the gun still has to rotate, meaning at least the hands have to rotate. Nothing moves; it's all perfectly still.
Very well; let this abomination unto the Lord begin!
As a catholic it is still more complex. You need to famliarize yourself with the concept of Just War. Lots of soldiers, probably even most soldiers world-wide are Catholic if they are not Muslim, and have been throughout history since the establishment of Christianity.
One side can kill the other without facing death themselves
The men that make decisions regarding war have always been able to do so without facing death themselves. Nothing new here.
The large number of friendly fire and collateral damage reports suggests that humans are not very good at target recognition. I suspect that AI can do better
If you can stop a missile with a bullet, do it!
Or, if you can stop a bullet with the largest non-nuclear armament ever deployed in combat, do it!
Stop blaming the bow and take responsibility for your actions.
Does it change things if I'm drunk while shooting the bow? I think it does.
the technology used makes no difference
In some absolutist systems perhaps but most of us live in a little more grey world. Its not as simple question of minimizing the absolute violence in the world. There are other considerations. When is it our fight, only when we are threatened? when who we consider to be the victims are unable to defend themselves? When our 'allies' are threatened?
Does it matter that we have a volunteer armed services, that our people had a choice to be put in harms way. What if we have a draft again in the future does that raise the bar for the entering a war?
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I'd have a wrist eyeball behind the gun sight and an encapsulated magnetically operated trigger that makes a captured pistol hard for non-robots to fire. I suppose it'd be nice for the robot to be able to fire a weapon that it captured, but the pistol in the photo doesn't look like the preferred weapon of its enemy. A good demo of algorithmic superiority would be for the robot to pick up and fire a cheap old pistol, miss and put subsequent shots exactly on target by exactly compensating for the amount of the initial miss.
There is always the potential for civilian casualties, especially with large impact remote weapons systems. The next question is what is a legitimate target. I don't think if you are fighting a war for example all civilians are really off limits in terms of targets. What about the guy working in the tire factory, or the oil field. You know his effort supports the war effort and he knows it too but is still working there, is he fair target? What about the farmer tending his wheat field? I would say yes! If taking out that facility means either sweeping it with ground forces and loosing American lives or bombing / sending in terminator unit and killing some 'enemy' non-combatants, better them than us, would be my call.
You make a good war criminal. The problem with going down that route is that everybody loses. Civilization stagnates as infrastructure and knowledge is continually destroyed, so we return to a period where we have fragmented tribes at total war with each other. You don't think America will be able to maintain military superiority forever, do you?
You don't think robots will eventually decide when to fire? It could happen soon!
Why not just drink cyanide?
since when did cruise missiles count as ground infantry? must be a new type of missile I have not heard of?
You do know technology actually progresses?
They can have human temperature figures go past the place of question first before the rest proceed. If they find an automatic gun, they kill the nest.
Nothing moves; it's all perfectly still.
I watched the video closely again, and the hands clearly move. I'm really not seeing the problem. Nothing else needs to move ... this isn't a Hollywood movie ...
have you ever shot a handgun?
All of your questions are pure moral and ethical questions and the technology used has no bearing at all on the answers.
Hey derp-stick, you consider the crimes of ISIS to be equivalent to a bullet in that analogy? So a whole training camp dug into the mountains, for a group that has done the things they have in Iraq and Syria, trying to take over a new area and commit those same crimes against a new group of civilians, that's just 1 bullet to you? hurdurrrrrrrrr to you to, maaaaaaaaaaan.
You should read less between the lines. I didn't say anything about the right / wrong of the action. I said the analogy of stopping a bigger weapon with a smaller weapon is exactly the opposite of the actual example. But don't let this get in the way of your ranting. Carry on soldier!
Obviously, all the moral responsibility is still on the human that presses the "on" button, or who turns off the safeties and places it in combat mode. Duh.
Even there you don't find any new moral or ethical issue.
I didn't read "between" the lines, I simply carried the context from a comment to the reply. If your reply didn't intend to carry the context of what it was replying to, then I can't help you with that.
All I can say is, enjoy your delusion. Imagining people think things and then yelling at them for it is FUN!
Fortunately, ISIS doesn't have anywhere near the threat or military potential of 1939 Germany.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The USN has had air defense guns on ships that will fire automatically for a long time. The day-to-day human control is switching the things on and off.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm fairly sure a quad-copter (or even an octo-copter) would be unable to fly in weightlessness conditions aboard the International Space Station
I'm fairly sure it wouldn't. Why did you think it would?
Ezekiel 23:20
On nation war criminal is anthers hero. Its always been that way. There are few lines Westerns have generally agreed should not be crossed but usually it comes down to intent. Yes its wrong to target civilians, its not always wrong to target assets even when that means civilians will die.
Dropping incendiaries on wheat fields and automotive plants because you can is wrong clearly. Doing it because you *need* to disrupt the enemies supply chain so as to save the lives of your own service men, does not seem so unethical to me. I would echo Harris' comments on the bombing of Dresden:
Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.
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