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US Seeks To Allay Fears Over Killer Robots (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the calm-down,-everyone dept.

Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, the US Department of Defense said today. From a report: The statement comes as plans emerge for gun platforms that can choose their own targets on the battlefield. The plans seek to upgrade existing aiming systems, using developments in machine intelligence. The US said rules governing armed robots still stood and humans would retain the power to veto their actions. The defense department's plans seek to upgrade the current Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (Atlas) used on ground combat vehicles to help human gunners aim. The military is seeking commercial partners to help develop aiming systems to "acquire, identify, and engage targets at least three times faster than the current manual process."

3 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by lrichardson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "The US said rules governing armed robots still stood and humans would retain the power to veto their actions."

    Uh, say WHAT? That line says something completely different from 'requiring human finger on every trigger'.

    "Yeah, I coulda - probably shoulda - vetoed that Predator bombing on the wedding, but I was in the can at the time."

    1. Re:Huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "Yeah, I coulda - probably shoulda - vetoed that Predator bombing on the wedding, but I was in the can at the time."

      Like we need an amoral AI to do that.

      Obama signed orders personally on several occasions to bomb weddings or funerals filled with known-innocent people because one of them kinda sorta looked like Osama Bin Laden from 10,000 feet.

      I did a paper and presentation about it for my second degree. He knew exactly what he was doing and did it anyway.

  2. Been playing Horizon: Zero Dawn recently by Anubis+IV · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For anyone not familiar, the entire premise of the game is that you're in a post-apocalyptic world about 1000 years after our war robots went out of control, with exactly the sorts of results you'd expect. I found it interesting when, in a moment of self-awareness, the main character discovers a recording circa 2065 of an engineer who worked on the war robots lamenting the fact that they didn't pay attention to the warnings that were everywhere in the science fiction material of the day. More or less, we already had a good notion of how this would end, so why, oh why, did we go along with it?

    Honestly, I do wonder how we can avoid a bad outcome. After all, if we don't build them, our opponents will (for whatever definition of "opponent" you want to pick), since taking the human out of the loopwill eventually confer a large tactical advantage. It's one of those horrible things where no one wants it, but everyone seems to be forced to do it anyway. So, how to avoid it in the long-term?