I do that, too. It's especially convenient when you're someplace like Iraq- there's no reason to carry all the crap that sustained you for the last months (books, extra shoes, DVDs, fake Rolexes, souvenirs). I try to get all my stuff into two medium bags, and mail the rest home. Everyone else is carrying 3+ 50-lb bags around in 100-degree heat.
It's pretty awesome to get through the airport with almost nothing and come home with your luggage already waiting for you. Perfect.
>>Why should you care if the airlines are making a profit? The more lucrative the industry, the more companies enter the field, the more competition, and the better prices and service we get. Maybe not right away, but in the long run we do like the companies that provide services to us to minimize their costs.
That would explain our $100/barrel oil while Exxon just posted the biggest profit of any corporation ever on earth ($40.6 billion). Just for perspective, Exxon's profits last year were around $10 billion.
Do the big intelligence agencies--CIA, NSA, NRO, FBI--not already fulfill this role? Is the Air Force reinventing the wheel with this program? As both a taxpayer and an NCO, how can I trust that this AFCC will hire and train its members to some standard that we never see in the field? Do you plan on becoming an entirely insular organization? If so, why is the Air Force accepting this mission instead of spending the money on renewing our aging fleet of _AIR_craft?
Because when products that could cost $5 from china start costing $7 or even $10, people will realize just how poorly our economy is doing.
Covering up the cost of consumer goods is a great way to hide the declining strength of the dollar. "Oh, the dollar just dropped again. It's ok, we'll offset that by importing even cheaper crap."
I'm impartial here- I'm not buying hi-def stuff for many years. But I think that a valid answer to your question would be, "I bought these hi-def movies, and I want to play them on my laptop. And now you're telling me that I have to buy a DVD version of the same movie if I want my battery to last the whole movie?"
The only other option is to rip the hi-def disk to the hard drive, which is I guess illegal still.
So I'd say that people aren't trying to get a hi-def viewing experience out of their laptops, they're trying to get a viewing experience out of their hi-def movies on something besides the TV.
I think that your plan to imprison illegal aliens (~$27,000/year) might be more disruptive to our economy than simply paying them $5/day to work here.
It would be cheaper to grant them citizenship, and then if they are criminals, we'll treat them as such. If they are not criminals, then they should be treated like ordinary citizens. If they refuse citizenship, then they should be deported. It needs to come down to money, which is the only thing politicians understand. We could make money by taxing these people if they were citizens and their wages were not under the table.
The problem is that most people turn this into a matter of nationalism, or honor, or racism, and there is no compromising with these kinds of people.
We do have unions. I appreciate your kind thoughts, but please stop treating soldiers like idiots.
We have very good healthcare, more rights in some situations than civilians (READ the UCMJ sometime), and we are not forced to perform immoral or indecent acts as defined by geneva convention (if pressured to do something illegal, every soldier has a right and responsibility to report it). We can sometimes be poorly-equipped, and at other times it rains gold. That's life in any large bureaucracy.
In my city, I get paid more than any other 25-year-old I know with the exception of the broker's son (a buddy of mine) and a programmer. I receive housing allowance and food allowance- this is all public knowledge. My take-home pay (after taxes) is about $3000/month. That pay will vary since the housing allowance is based on zip code; there are places in Hawaii that pay $2000/month housing allowance.
As long as I'm not a complete asshat and don't spend all that money on a new mustang and a $300,000 house and booze and credit cards, I will be fine. The military provides everything you need if you're willing to live within your means. If you have 6 kids and your wife doesn't work, then the military might not be the best choice for you. But it is NOT the military's FAULT that you are poor just because they don't PREVENT you from being poor in the first place. And you do get paid extra per dependent.
The military is no vacation, but there are happy people doing worse jobs.
There are more pot heads than service members. If the gov't is trying to control our thoughts, they're doing a pretty poor job of it. Oh, and current military member speaking. Nothing has changed in my personality that wouldn't have changed as a result of having a high-pressure, dangerous job in any other field. I don't like it when people talk about members of the military (any nation's military) like we're drones or sub-normal miscreants or something. We're not stupid.
>>The wind slows down, so what efect does taking energy from the wind have?
Ask yourself where that energy will go in the big picture, and ask yourself how much energy that wind contains to begin with. I'll give you a hint: Watch the trees blowing back and forth. I'll give you another hint: wind moves millions of tons of water thousands of miles. There is more energy in our atmosphere than we could ever hope to tap with crude windmills. I don't think there is enough mineable aluminum on earth to make enough windmills to make the slightest dent in large-scale weather patterns.
It's good to ask questions like you are doing, but you'll be pleased to know that the answer to that one question isn't so bad.
You're right, but the military would seem a lot less sinister if it just said, "No blogs. No Flash sites. No streaming video, no mp3s, no pr0n, no solitaire, no minesweeper, no facebook, none of that crap. Get back to work."
And frankly I'd agree with them. I'll bet 90% of my base's internet traffic is just goof-off stuff like/. and eBay.
I kept a blog the first time I went to Iraq- just personal stuff, how I was doing, what my days were like. I consciously left out anything that I could construe as valuable intel (names, schedules, specific locations of things, etc.). In fact, I thought I did a good job of making it into a personal blog and keeping the military part out of it, except for the stories that would only really happen to me as a result of being IN the military. You know. This was fine, it was a great way for my whole family to know that I was all right and to keep in touch in the comments. It was public, but it didn't show up on google and I didn't advertise the address outside of my immediate family.
Then after about a month my aunt decided that she like my writing so much that she would forward my blog to a writer at a big metro newspaper. The reporter called my home unit's PR officer to make sure I was a real person and that I was actually overseas. My PR officer called me at work in Iraq to discuss things. He read the blog, complimented me on it, and asked/begged me to not post anything damaging. I assured him that I would keep things safe. He said something to the effect of, "I'd tell you to stop, but the cat's pretty much out of the bag now."
The second time I went over there, blogspot was blocked, so I didn't keep a written record. I could have circumvented it by sending the entries to a friend who could then post them on the blog, but frankly I wasn't feeling very motivated. Iraq is a great thing to blog about the first time you're there, but after that it is just one shitty day after another. I didn't want to export those feelings to the folks back home.
In the Air Force, we get quite a bit of it, most of it useless. To the people I work with, learning about trojans and phishing is like teaching a group of cheerleaders the finer points of magnetohydrodynamics. It isn't that they aren't smart, but the way of thinking that geeks take for granted just doesn't correlate to how most people think. I'm talking about logic, induction, deduction, critical thinking, etc. To most people, someone who understands the windows registry or how to set up a firewall is an expert.
Back on topic, I think I spend about 4 hours a years on mandatory INFOSEC and "Information Awareness". Yes, that's what they call it.
Well I guess we can agree that the definition of 'robot' can be a vague thing. Now we need to decide at what point a gun is a killbot- I would say that the predator is not, and a terminator-style android is. Everything in between is in a grey area. I wouldn't call a motion-sensing turret a robot because, much like a garage door, it is a very deterministic input/output sequence.
A roomba, yes, I would call that a robot. It develops its own path and its actions are much less controlled by initial input. It 'explores'. Its strength is cleaning, and it would require orders of magnitude more processing to non-deterministically clean AND effectively wield a gun, targetting only what it 'should' target. Actually, I wouldn't even say that its strength is cleaning, unless it can identify more soiled areas and work on them more often. Its strength is traversing an area at least once without leaving areas untraversed.
Maybe we should develop a turing test for killbots, where a robot and a human shoot at targets and obsevers try to determine which is the human.
A small red spacecraft breaks through the cloud cover of Mysterio system planet 6! At the controls, it's none other than our fearless hero, Spaceman Spiff! Piloting over the lifeless world, he reflects on his unusual mission...
QUIZ 1. 6+5=...to somehoe crash planets 6 and 5 together!
In a scientific mission to discover what happens when two planets collide, Spaceman Spiff drops anchor! The anchor catches on a hillside! Spiff downshifts and guns the motor! Imperceptibly at first, the planet slowly moves, towed along by our hero, until......breaking orbit, planet 6 picks up speed, hurling towards planet 5!
Pulled by Spaceman Spiff, planet 6 is about to collide with planet 5! With no time to lose, our hero cuts loose the anchor and flies to safety! The planets crash, grinding and shattering with awful force! Planet 5, being smaller, is crunched to dust! Only 6 remains!
I used to live near a mine where much, much more than a thousand tons of rock was blasted in one shot. That is miniscule compared to the moon's total mass. The moon is bigger than you think, maybe.
The moon is also much farther away than you think, maybe, and its gravity is maybe stronger than you think. Maybe.
Regarding >>Not that war is impossible unless it's misguided (obviously it's not); but it's rarer than a pure "kill-or-be-killed" logic would suggest.
I would say that for the most part, this is true- a good example was the cold war with the concept of MAD. However, warfare is rapidly changing towards asymmetrical threats such as what we face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much has been made of "we have million-dollar weapons yet we are being beaten by people with pipe bombs," and that is very true. This is a devolution (IMO) to the older state of kill or be killed, where you have an asymmetric threat that can only really be neutralized by that primitive ethos. When your enemy wants to die to kill you, then deterence is no longer effective. The bases in Iraq are the very picture of deterence in terms of fire- and manpower, yet they are attacked daily. This affects other societies, too- look at the suicide bombing going on in Pakistan.
We'll see if this is a phase or if the face of warfare will be completely changed due to these tactics. Deterence, technology, rules of engagement (such as taking prisoners)- these only work in warfare with states (if they work at all). The conflicts we currently face are with individuals, and our old strategies are failing us. The solution will have to come from something outside the military, not kill-bots.
I think the toaster thing is too deterministic to be called a robot. IMO, a robot is a machine that can take an instruction ("rivet these parts together") and synthesize its own internal instruction set in order to complete the task. In essence, the less control a human has over the machine's actions, the more robotic it is. The toaster example is more like setting a ball on top of a ramp and calling it a robot because it rolls down the ramp. The torpedo mine is just more complicated; ultimately it is simply a rube goldberg device of rolling balls and ramps. Take one hall effect transistor, a few more to amplify, some other crap, a solenoid, and you have the mine. Rig up an electric motor with servos controlled by a simple comparator circuit hooked up to a few microphones- there's your simple homing torpedo.
A robotic mine might achieve the same ends, but through very different means in terms of solving the problem. This thing is not very different from setting a tripwire-fired claymore.
I can rig up a cheap light-sensitive diode to a solenoid and a power source- that's what the toaster is. Or you can look at the governor on a steam engine- it controls the steam engine without human intervention, but if you call that a robot, then I'd say your definition is too loose to be useful. After all, terrorists already have toasters, therefore terrorists already have robots?
I agree with you completely, but I thought I'd add something. You said (regarding Predator, I assume),
>>also all firing sequences are still human in the loop.
Which is true, if by "in the loop" you mean:
-track and obtain target -notify higher ups -troop locations in the area are noted -intel assets in the area are noted -missile trajectory noted; there are rules about what a missile can fly over -target evaluated; will that soft riverbank be firm enough to set off the missile? Maybe not. Are we sure they are bad guys? Oh, there's there still-smoking mortar tube in infrared. Yes. -the wave-off or go-ahead comes down -the target is locked, and the missile is fired after multiple safeties are disengaged.
In combat footage it may not seem like all those steps happen, but they do. It just happens faster than you might expect, or it might not be part of the tape that you saw. As the parent said- make no mistake, these systems are not autonomous.
Finally, a voice of reason. Listen people (not you, wrench, you're ok), even HUMANS can't shoot autonomously. The whole "fire at will" thing from the movies is just that. It's movie stuff. You have no idea how many times I've heard grunts bitch about how they had bad guys in their sights, only to be told by their CO or XO to stand down. They need to get permission to fire. The predator pilots need explicit permission to fire (Yes, they are piloted by humans, and the missiles are fired by humans). There is a very specific methodology of escalating tactics to subdue an enemy, and death is at the very end. And believe me, escalating things 'your own way' will land you in jail. You might be surprised how much we have our hands 'tied behind our back' in the field. And you might reply, "Good, that's the way it should be," and I would agree with you- but then stop bitching about how the gov't is making killbots in order to rule the world. A dead enemy is just as politically important, one way or the other, no matter how he or she is killed. It's a nasty business, and robots would fuck it up.
What is your definition of robot? Would my toaster be a robot? My wall clock? Surely you would consider a doorbell to be as much a robot as a landmine, as they both work on identical principles- push, explode. push, ding.
The gov't knows this. That's why no one is allowed to take pictures of soldiers' caskets any more.
As a soldier, I would prefer robots to take my place, since I'm jaded enough to realize that war is going to happen. It will happen no matter what. That is what we are.
We descended from animals who killed to survive, and then survived to become even more efficient killers. Talking or reasoning has never been the core of our humanity; in fact, I would say that we can talk and reason in SPITE of our humanity. We are deadly, dangerous, bad-assed warriors who will mash up and destroy anything that comes in our way. Whether it's sex, money, power, land, honor, or self-defense, we have a track record of solving everything with violence. Violence DOES solve everything. It might not be the nicest or most efficient way to solve something, but it will solve your immediate problem.
Most of you, living relatively peaceful lives with all of your primary needs attended to, might disagree with me. I say that you are protected from your humanity by those of us who go out and do your killing and pillaging for you. If we didn't do it, you would be forced to. And if you refused, you would be trampled into the ground. And you know this. And that is why you pay huge amounts of money for people like me to go out and do your dirty work for you. Protest HOW we do it all you like (I'd be there with you), but you cannot deny the WHY.
Law and order. Whose order? Yours. Don't kid yourselves- you are all very, very capable of waging vicious war if necessary. But I'll take the paycheck;-)
My toaster is autonomous. So is my computer, if I tell it to be. The Predator, by any useful definition, is not a robot. The missiles were fired by someone looking at a computer screen, aiming the reticle with a joystick. I've seen it happen.
If a cruise missile is a robot, then so are those little cars that follow a line drawn on paper. They do exactly what you tell them to, barring mechanical malfunction, just like any other machine. A ballistic missile or rocket is not a robot any more than a bullet is. Tanks and jets and bombs and such are obviously not robots. I would say that the only robot that we have used in the war is the Global Hawk, which does in fact fly and gather data autonomously. The bomb-squad robots, or anything else guided by a monitor in a suitcase ~100 yards away, is not a robot. It is a remote-controlled car with a camera on it.
I think in Asimov's universe, a robot would be more realistically defined as looking vaguely human and passing a turing-type test (or coming very close). If the robot was not humanoid, then it would need to be able to interact meaningfully with humans. It would need to act autonomously and interpret and execute orders without an intermediary, i.e., human->robot->action. I don't think Asimov would freak out if an industrial robot killed someone because the person got in the way. He would just call that robo-welder an automaton just like a toaster.
All of this is moot, of course, because the three laws were a literary device INTENDED to reveal corner cases and inconsistencies that made for good reading. Perfect robot laws would be like natural laws, and a fiction account of it would be as interesting as a weather report in death valley.
Point is, we don't have robots. Robots require strong, massively parallel AI, IMO. Of course it really boils down to whether or not you believe that humans themselves are free agents, and if they are, then deciding what it would take to make a robot a free agent. If you don't think that humans are free agents, then you need to define a robot on somewhat more arbitrary terms, since ultimately every decision the robot will make will be determined prior to its manufacture.
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I do that, too. It's especially convenient when you're someplace like Iraq- there's no reason to carry all the crap that sustained you for the last months (books, extra shoes, DVDs, fake Rolexes, souvenirs). I try to get all my stuff into two medium bags, and mail the rest home. Everyone else is carrying 3+ 50-lb bags around in 100-degree heat.
It's pretty awesome to get through the airport with almost nothing and come home with your luggage already waiting for you. Perfect.
-b
>>Why should you care if the airlines are making a profit? The more lucrative the industry, the more companies enter the field, the more competition, and the better prices and service we get. Maybe not right away, but in the long run we do like the companies that provide services to us to minimize their costs.
That would explain our $100/barrel oil while Exxon just posted the biggest profit of any corporation ever on earth ($40.6 billion). Just for perspective, Exxon's profits last year were around $10 billion.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/article/chevron-exxon-record-profits-reaped-cost-sliding-economy-strapped-consumers_461941_1.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/01/exxon-posts-record-profit_n_84463.html
http://www.usnews.com/articles/business/economy/2008/02/01/exxons-profits-measuring-a-record-windfall.html
I agree with your post except for that last part.
-b
General-
Do the big intelligence agencies--CIA, NSA, NRO, FBI--not already fulfill this role? Is the Air Force reinventing the wheel with this program?
As both a taxpayer and an NCO, how can I trust that this AFCC will hire and train its members to some standard that we never see in the field?
Do you plan on becoming an entirely insular organization?
If so, why is the Air Force accepting this mission instead of spending the money on renewing our aging fleet of _AIR_craft?
Thank you for your time, General.
-b
Because when products that could cost $5 from china start costing $7 or even $10, people will realize just how poorly our economy is doing.
Covering up the cost of consumer goods is a great way to hide the declining strength of the dollar. "Oh, the dollar just dropped again. It's ok, we'll offset that by importing even cheaper crap."
-b
I have a hard time seeing blu-ray players in 'low-end' laptops any time soon.
-b
I'm impartial here- I'm not buying hi-def stuff for many years. But I think that a valid answer to your question would be, "I bought these hi-def movies, and I want to play them on my laptop. And now you're telling me that I have to buy a DVD version of the same movie if I want my battery to last the whole movie?"
The only other option is to rip the hi-def disk to the hard drive, which is I guess illegal still.
So I'd say that people aren't trying to get a hi-def viewing experience out of their laptops, they're trying to get a viewing experience out of their hi-def movies on something besides the TV.
-b
I think that your plan to imprison illegal aliens (~$27,000/year) might be more disruptive to our economy than simply paying them $5/day to work here.
It would be cheaper to grant them citizenship, and then if they are criminals, we'll treat them as such. If they are not criminals, then they should be treated like ordinary citizens. If they refuse citizenship, then they should be deported. It needs to come down to money, which is the only thing politicians understand. We could make money by taxing these people if they were citizens and their wages were not under the table.
The problem is that most people turn this into a matter of nationalism, or honor, or racism, and there is no compromising with these kinds of people.
-b
I always thought that the F5 network was refreshing.
-b
I second the parent.
-b
We do have unions. I appreciate your kind thoughts, but please stop treating soldiers like idiots.
We have very good healthcare, more rights in some situations than civilians (READ the UCMJ sometime), and we are not forced to perform immoral or indecent acts as defined by geneva convention (if pressured to do something illegal, every soldier has a right and responsibility to report it). We can sometimes be poorly-equipped, and at other times it rains gold. That's life in any large bureaucracy.
In my city, I get paid more than any other 25-year-old I know with the exception of the broker's son (a buddy of mine) and a programmer. I receive housing allowance and food allowance- this is all public knowledge. My take-home pay (after taxes) is about $3000/month. That pay will vary since the housing allowance is based on zip code; there are places in Hawaii that pay $2000/month housing allowance.
As long as I'm not a complete asshat and don't spend all that money on a new mustang and a $300,000 house and booze and credit cards, I will be fine. The military provides everything you need if you're willing to live within your means. If you have 6 kids and your wife doesn't work, then the military might not be the best choice for you. But it is NOT the military's FAULT that you are poor just because they don't PREVENT you from being poor in the first place. And you do get paid extra per dependent.
The military is no vacation, but there are happy people doing worse jobs.
-b
There are more pot heads than service members. If the gov't is trying to control our thoughts, they're doing a pretty poor job of it. Oh, and current military member speaking. Nothing has changed in my personality that wouldn't have changed as a result of having a high-pressure, dangerous job in any other field. I don't like it when people talk about members of the military (any nation's military) like we're drones or sub-normal miscreants or something. We're not stupid.
-b
>>The wind slows down, so what efect does taking energy from the wind have?
Ask yourself where that energy will go in the big picture, and ask yourself how much energy that wind contains to begin with. I'll give you a hint: Watch the trees blowing back and forth. I'll give you another hint: wind moves millions of tons of water thousands of miles. There is more energy in our atmosphere than we could ever hope to tap with crude windmills. I don't think there is enough mineable aluminum on earth to make enough windmills to make the slightest dent in large-scale weather patterns.
It's good to ask questions like you are doing, but you'll be pleased to know that the answer to that one question isn't so bad.
-b
You're right, but the military would seem a lot less sinister if it just said, "No blogs. No Flash sites. No streaming video, no mp3s, no pr0n, no solitaire, no minesweeper, no facebook, none of that crap. Get back to work."
/. and eBay.
And frankly I'd agree with them. I'll bet 90% of my base's internet traffic is just goof-off stuff like
-b
I'm Air Force, too.
I kept a blog the first time I went to Iraq- just personal stuff, how I was doing, what my days were like. I consciously left out anything that I could construe as valuable intel (names, schedules, specific locations of things, etc.). In fact, I thought I did a good job of making it into a personal blog and keeping the military part out of it, except for the stories that would only really happen to me as a result of being IN the military. You know. This was fine, it was a great way for my whole family to know that I was all right and to keep in touch in the comments. It was public, but it didn't show up on google and I didn't advertise the address outside of my immediate family.
Then after about a month my aunt decided that she like my writing so much that she would forward my blog to a writer at a big metro newspaper. The reporter called my home unit's PR officer to make sure I was a real person and that I was actually overseas. My PR officer called me at work in Iraq to discuss things. He read the blog, complimented me on it, and asked/begged me to not post anything damaging. I assured him that I would keep things safe. He said something to the effect of, "I'd tell you to stop, but the cat's pretty much out of the bag now."
The second time I went over there, blogspot was blocked, so I didn't keep a written record. I could have circumvented it by sending the entries to a friend who could then post them on the blog, but frankly I wasn't feeling very motivated. Iraq is a great thing to blog about the first time you're there, but after that it is just one shitty day after another. I didn't want to export those feelings to the folks back home.
-b
In the Air Force, we get quite a bit of it, most of it useless. To the people I work with, learning about trojans and phishing is like teaching a group of cheerleaders the finer points of magnetohydrodynamics. It isn't that they aren't smart, but the way of thinking that geeks take for granted just doesn't correlate to how most people think. I'm talking about logic, induction, deduction, critical thinking, etc. To most people, someone who understands the windows registry or how to set up a firewall is an expert.
Back on topic, I think I spend about 4 hours a years on mandatory INFOSEC and "Information Awareness". Yes, that's what they call it.
-b
Well I guess we can agree that the definition of 'robot' can be a vague thing. Now we need to decide at what point a gun is a killbot- I would say that the predator is not, and a terminator-style android is. Everything in between is in a grey area. I wouldn't call a motion-sensing turret a robot because, much like a garage door, it is a very deterministic input/output sequence.
A roomba, yes, I would call that a robot. It develops its own path and its actions are much less controlled by initial input. It 'explores'. Its strength is cleaning, and it would require orders of magnitude more processing to non-deterministically clean AND effectively wield a gun, targetting only what it 'should' target. Actually, I wouldn't even say that its strength is cleaning, unless it can identify more soiled areas and work on them more often. Its strength is traversing an area at least once without leaving areas untraversed.
Maybe we should develop a turing test for killbots, where a robot and a human shoot at targets and obsevers try to determine which is the human.
-b
A small red spacecraft breaks through the cloud cover of Mysterio system planet 6! At the controls, it's none other than our fearless hero, Spaceman Spiff! Piloting over the lifeless world, he reflects on his unusual mission...
...to somehoe crash planets 6 and 5 together!
...breaking orbit, planet 6 picks up speed, hurling towards planet 5!
QUIZ
1. 6+5=
In a scientific mission to discover what happens when two planets collide, Spaceman Spiff drops anchor! The anchor catches on a hillside! Spiff downshifts and guns the motor! Imperceptibly at first, the planet slowly moves, towed along by our hero, until...
Pulled by Spaceman Spiff, planet 6 is about to collide with planet 5! With no time to lose, our hero cuts loose the anchor and flies to safety! The planets crash, grinding and shattering with awful force! Planet 5, being smaller, is crunched to dust! Only 6 remains!
6+5=6.
Of course taken from Bill Watterson. Sorry, Bill.
-b
I used to live near a mine where much, much more than a thousand tons of rock was blasted in one shot. That is miniscule compared to the moon's total mass. The moon is bigger than you think, maybe.
The moon is also much farther away than you think, maybe, and its gravity is maybe stronger than you think. Maybe.
-b
You made a good point about Stalinism.
Regarding
>>Not that war is impossible unless it's misguided (obviously it's not); but it's rarer than a pure "kill-or-be-killed" logic would suggest.
I would say that for the most part, this is true- a good example was the cold war with the concept of MAD. However, warfare is rapidly changing towards asymmetrical threats such as what we face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much has been made of "we have million-dollar weapons yet we are being beaten by people with pipe bombs," and that is very true. This is a devolution (IMO) to the older state of kill or be killed, where you have an asymmetric threat that can only really be neutralized by that primitive ethos. When your enemy wants to die to kill you, then deterence is no longer effective. The bases in Iraq are the very picture of deterence in terms of fire- and manpower, yet they are attacked daily. This affects other societies, too- look at the suicide bombing going on in Pakistan.
We'll see if this is a phase or if the face of warfare will be completely changed due to these tactics. Deterence, technology, rules of engagement (such as taking prisoners)- these only work in warfare with states (if they work at all). The conflicts we currently face are with individuals, and our old strategies are failing us. The solution will have to come from something outside the military, not kill-bots.
-b
I think the toaster thing is too deterministic to be called a robot. IMO, a robot is a machine that can take an instruction ("rivet these parts together") and synthesize its own internal instruction set in order to complete the task. In essence, the less control a human has over the machine's actions, the more robotic it is. The toaster example is more like setting a ball on top of a ramp and calling it a robot because it rolls down the ramp. The torpedo mine is just more complicated; ultimately it is simply a rube goldberg device of rolling balls and ramps. Take one hall effect transistor, a few more to amplify, some other crap, a solenoid, and you have the mine. Rig up an electric motor with servos controlled by a simple comparator circuit hooked up to a few microphones- there's your simple homing torpedo.
A robotic mine might achieve the same ends, but through very different means in terms of solving the problem. This thing is not very different from setting a tripwire-fired claymore.
I can rig up a cheap light-sensitive diode to a solenoid and a power source- that's what the toaster is. Or you can look at the governor on a steam engine- it controls the steam engine without human intervention, but if you call that a robot, then I'd say your definition is too loose to be useful. After all, terrorists already have toasters, therefore terrorists already have robots?
Now I'll be reading about mines all night...
-b
I agree with you completely, but I thought I'd add something. You said (regarding Predator, I assume),
>>also all firing sequences are still human in the loop.
Which is true, if by "in the loop" you mean:
-track and obtain target
-notify higher ups
-troop locations in the area are noted
-intel assets in the area are noted
-missile trajectory noted; there are rules about what a missile can fly over
-target evaluated; will that soft riverbank be firm enough to set off the missile? Maybe not. Are we sure they are bad guys? Oh, there's there still-smoking mortar tube in infrared. Yes.
-the wave-off or go-ahead comes down
-the target is locked, and the missile is fired after multiple safeties are disengaged.
In combat footage it may not seem like all those steps happen, but they do. It just happens faster than you might expect, or it might not be part of the tape that you saw. As the parent said- make no mistake, these systems are not autonomous.
-b
Finally, a voice of reason. Listen people (not you, wrench, you're ok), even HUMANS can't shoot autonomously. The whole "fire at will" thing from the movies is just that. It's movie stuff. You have no idea how many times I've heard grunts bitch about how they had bad guys in their sights, only to be told by their CO or XO to stand down. They need to get permission to fire. The predator pilots need explicit permission to fire (Yes, they are piloted by humans, and the missiles are fired by humans). There is a very specific methodology of escalating tactics to subdue an enemy, and death is at the very end. And believe me, escalating things 'your own way' will land you in jail. You might be surprised how much we have our hands 'tied behind our back' in the field. And you might reply, "Good, that's the way it should be," and I would agree with you- but then stop bitching about how the gov't is making killbots in order to rule the world. A dead enemy is just as politically important, one way or the other, no matter how he or she is killed. It's a nasty business, and robots would fuck it up.
-b
What is your definition of robot? Would my toaster be a robot? My wall clock? Surely you would consider a doorbell to be as much a robot as a landmine, as they both work on identical principles- push, explode. push, ding.
-b
The gov't knows this. That's why no one is allowed to take pictures of soldiers' caskets any more.
;-)
As a soldier, I would prefer robots to take my place, since I'm jaded enough to realize that war is going to happen. It will happen no matter what. That is what we are.
We descended from animals who killed to survive, and then survived to become even more efficient killers. Talking or reasoning has never been the core of our humanity; in fact, I would say that we can talk and reason in SPITE of our humanity. We are deadly, dangerous, bad-assed warriors who will mash up and destroy anything that comes in our way. Whether it's sex, money, power, land, honor, or self-defense, we have a track record of solving everything with violence. Violence DOES solve everything. It might not be the nicest or most efficient way to solve something, but it will solve your immediate problem.
Most of you, living relatively peaceful lives with all of your primary needs attended to, might disagree with me. I say that you are protected from your humanity by those of us who go out and do your killing and pillaging for you. If we didn't do it, you would be forced to. And if you refused, you would be trampled into the ground. And you know this. And that is why you pay huge amounts of money for people like me to go out and do your dirty work for you. Protest HOW we do it all you like (I'd be there with you), but you cannot deny the WHY.
Law and order. Whose order? Yours. Don't kid yourselves- you are all very, very capable of waging vicious war if necessary. But I'll take the paycheck
-b
I think part of the problem is defining "robot."
My toaster is autonomous. So is my computer, if I tell it to be. The Predator, by any useful definition, is not a robot. The missiles were fired by someone looking at a computer screen, aiming the reticle with a joystick. I've seen it happen.
If a cruise missile is a robot, then so are those little cars that follow a line drawn on paper. They do exactly what you tell them to, barring mechanical malfunction, just like any other machine. A ballistic missile or rocket is not a robot any more than a bullet is. Tanks and jets and bombs and such are obviously not robots. I would say that the only robot that we have used in the war is the Global Hawk, which does in fact fly and gather data autonomously. The bomb-squad robots, or anything else guided by a monitor in a suitcase ~100 yards away, is not a robot. It is a remote-controlled car with a camera on it.
I think in Asimov's universe, a robot would be more realistically defined as looking vaguely human and passing a turing-type test (or coming very close). If the robot was not humanoid, then it would need to be able to interact meaningfully with humans. It would need to act autonomously and interpret and execute orders without an intermediary, i.e., human->robot->action. I don't think Asimov would freak out if an industrial robot killed someone because the person got in the way. He would just call that robo-welder an automaton just like a toaster.
All of this is moot, of course, because the three laws were a literary device INTENDED to reveal corner cases and inconsistencies that made for good reading. Perfect robot laws would be like natural laws, and a fiction account of it would be as interesting as a weather report in death valley.
Point is, we don't have robots. Robots require strong, massively parallel AI, IMO. Of course it really boils down to whether or not you believe that humans themselves are free agents, and if they are, then deciding what it would take to make a robot a free agent. If you don't think that humans are free agents, then you need to define a robot on somewhat more arbitrary terms, since ultimately every decision the robot will make will be determined prior to its manufacture.
-b