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War Machines: Recruiting Robots for Combat
FORT BENNING, Ga. - War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots.
New robots, like the lawnmower-sized sentry Maars above, are being designed to handle a range of tasks, despite controversy about the impact on future warfare. (David Walter Banks for The New York Times) And while smart machines are already very much a part of modern warfare, the Army and its contractors are eager to add more. New robots - none of them particularly human-looking - are being designed to handle a broader range of tasks, from picking off snipers to serving as indefatigable night sentries.
In a mock city here used by Army Rangers for urban combat training, a 15-inch robot with a video camera scuttles around a bomb factory on a spying mission. Overhead an almost silent drone aircraft with a four-foot wingspan transmits images of the buildings below. Onto the scene rolls a sinister-looking vehicle on tank treads, about the size of a riding lawn mower, equipped with a machine gun and a grenade launcher.
Three backpack-clad technicians, standing out of the line of fire, operate the three robots with wireless video-game-style controllers. One swivels the video camera on the armed robot until it spots a sniper on a rooftop. The machine gun pirouettes, points and fires in two rapid bursts. Had the bullets been real, the target would have been destroyed.
The machines, viewed at a "Robotics Rodeo" last month at the Army's training school here, not only protect soldiers, but also are never distracted, using an unblinking digital eye, or "persistent stare," that automatically detects even the smallest motion. Nor do they ever panic under fire.
"One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second," said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.
Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.
"Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs" as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.
Civilians will be at greater risk, people in Mr. Wallach's camp argue, because of the challenges in distinguishing between fighters and innocent bystanders. That job is maddeningly difficult for human beings on the ground. It only becomes more difficult when a device is remotely operated.
This problem has already arisen with Predator aircraft, which find their targets with the aid of soldiers on the ground but are operated from the United States. Because civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan have died as a result of collateral damage or mistaken identities, Predators have generated international opposition and prompted accusations of war crimes.
But robot combatants are supported by a range of military strategists, officers and weapons designers - and even some human rights advocates.
"A lot of people fear artificial intelligence," said John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. "I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force."
Dr. Arquilla argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans.
His faith in machines is already being tested.
"Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines," Dr. Arquilla said. "We think that that's the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs."
Automation has proved vital in the wars America is fighting. In the air in Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft with names like Predator, Reaper, Raven and Global Hawk have kept countless soldiers from flying sorties. Moreover, the military now routinely uses more than 6,000 tele-operated robots to search vehicles at checkpoints as well as to disarm one of the enemies' most effective weapons: the I.E.D., or improvised explosive device.
Yet the shift to automated warfare may offer only a fleeting strategic advantage to the United States. Fifty-six nations are now developing robotic weapons, said Ron Arkin, a Georgia Institute of Technology roboticist and a government-financed researcher who has argued that it is possible to design "ethical" robots that conform to the laws of war and the military rules of escalation.
But the ethical issues are far from simple. Last month in Germany, an international group including artificial intelligence researchers, arms control specialists, human rights advocates and government officials called for agreements to limit the development and use of tele-operated and autonomous weapons.
The group, known as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, said warfare was accelerated by automated systems, undermining the capacity of human beings to make responsible decisions. For example, a gun that was designed to function without humans could shoot an attacker more quickly and without a soldier's consideration of subtle factors on the battlefield.
"The short-term benefits being derived from roboticizing aspects of warfare are likely to be far outweighed by the long-term consequences," said Mr. Wallach, the Yale scholar, suggesting that wars would occur more readily and that a technological arms race would develop.
As the debate continues, so do the Army's automation efforts. In 2001 Congress gave the Pentagon the goal of making one-third of the ground combat vehicles remotely operated by 2015. That seems unlikely, but there have been significant steps in that direction.
For example, a wagonlike Lockheed Martin device that can carry more than 1,000 pounds of gear and automatically follow a platoon at up to 17 miles per hour is scheduled to be tested in Afghanistan early next year.
For rougher terrain away from roads, engineers at Boston Dynamics are designing a walking robot to carry gear. Scheduled to be completed in 2012, it will carry 400 pounds as far as 20 miles, automatically following a soldier.
The four-legged modules have an extraordinary sense of balance, can climb steep grades and even move on icy surfaces. The robot's "head" has an array of sensors that give it the odd appearance of a cross between a bug and a dog. Indeed, an earlier experimental version of the robot was known as Big Dog.
This month the Army and the Australian military held a contest for teams designing mobile micro-robots - some no larger than model cars - that, operating in swarms, can map a potentially hostile area, accurately detecting a variety of threats.
Separately, a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School has proposed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency finance a robotic submarine system that would intelligently control teams of dolphins to detect underwater mines and protect ships in harbors.
"If we run into a conflict with Iran, the likelihood of them trying to do something in the Strait of Hormuz is quite high," said Raymond Buettner, deputy director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. "One land mine blowing up one ship and choking the world's oil supply pays for the entire Navy marine mammal program and its robotics program for a long time."
Such programs represent a resurgence in the development of autonomous systems in the wake of costly failures and the cancellation of the Army's most ambitious such program in 2009. That program was once estimated to cost more than $300 billion and expected to provide the Army with an array of manned and unmanned vehicles linked by a futuristic information network.
Now, the shift toward developing smaller, lighter and less expensive systems is unmistakable. Supporters say it is a consequence of the effort to cause fewer civilian casualties. The Predator aircraft, for example, is being equipped with smaller, lighter weapons than the traditional 100-pound Hellfire missile, with a smaller killing radius.
At the same time, military technologists assert that tele-operated, semi-autonomous and autonomous robots are the best way to protect the lives of American troops.
Army Special Forces units have bought six lawn-mower-size robots - the type showcased in the Robotics Rodeo - for classified missions, and the National Guard has asked for dozens more to serve as sentries on bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. These units are known as the Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System, or Maars, and they are made by a company called QinetiQ North America.
The Maars robots first attracted the military's interest as a defensive system during an Army Ranger exercise here in 2008. Used as a nighttime sentry against infiltrators equipped with thermal imaging vision systems, the battery-powered Maars unit remained invisible - it did not have the heat signature of a human being - and could "shoot" intruders with a laser tag gun without being detected itself, said Bob Quinn, a vice president at QinetiQ.
Maars is the descendant of an earlier experimental system built by QinetiQ. Three armed prototypes were sent to Iraq and created a brief controversy after they pointed a weapon inappropriately because of a software bug.
However, QinetiQ executives said the real shortcoming of the system was that it was rejected by Army legal officers because it did not follow military rules of engagement - for example, using voice warnings and then tear gas before firing guns. As a consequence, Maars has been equipped with a loudspeaker as well as a launcher so it can issue warnings and fire tear gas grenades before firing its machine gun.
Remotely controlled systems like the Predator aircraft and Maars move a step closer to concerns about the automation of warfare. What happens, ask skeptics, when humans are taken out of decision making on firing weapons? Despite the insistence of military officers that a human's finger will always remain on the trigger, the speed of combat is quickly becoming too fast for human decision makers.
"If the decisions are being made by a human being who has eyes on the target, whether he is sitting in a tank or miles away, the main safeguard is still there," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch, which tracks war crimes. "What happens when you automate the decision? Proponents are saying that their systems are win-win, but that doesn't reassure me."
53 Comments so far
Show AllWhat happens when the politicians of the war machine are manufactured robots too?
Maybe all the people will get to vote for is programers and hackers will be the "terrorists".
It looks like it's goin in that direction and It might be considered progress.
They might be able to manufacture "ethical robots," but I don't know if there is any technology that can manufacture ethical politicians.
Using robots to kill your fellow man is the lowest form of cowardice.
Coming to a town near you in the near future!
You got that right! Dehumanization equals make killing people to steal resources easier, ie makes empire easier. :(
what a joke! we can't even pay for a tunnel under the hudson river to relieve commuter congestion between NY and NJ! This is the nonsense that erupts when you put computer geeks in uniform and give them half a trillion dollars a year.
What a nation of abject cowards. First we attack countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq and Afghanistan, each time outsourcing more and more of the actual fighting, and now we announce that robots will fight our wars. American men sit around on their asses watching other men play football and pump their plump fists in the air while their women wince in the kitchen wondering when someone is gonna give them a proper banging.
God damn America.
Robots that kill--Coming soon to an AmeriKKKan neighborhood near you.
And I thought "The Terminator" was science fiction.
As Gore Vidal once accurately noted, from the title of one of his books:
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated
War would be much safer if it were fought by computer simulation.
The losers could fall on their own swords.
Safer for the idiot men that plan it and can't get enough of it especially if they don't even have to be there. As it is war is now mostly about killing civilians at a 7 to 1 ratio over combat troops. Curse everyone at the Pentagon and all the other military labs. May their bodies rot while their minds become clear enough to see how vile they've been.
Building the perfect totally enslaved society. This is not about what "they" will do to "them", halfway around the world... but about how "they" will control your discontent at what is coming our way. "Blessed be the childless, for they will not furnish slaves to the system".
Jonathan I am much less pessimistic than you seem to be. These ground-hugging weapons are totally useless against a mass uprising in urban environments unless they can elevate their guns to levels above the first few stories of tall urban structures. That was precisely the weakness of the Soviet tanks during the battle of Berlin in 1945. In urban warfare these electronic wonders must be accompanied by large numbers of traditional troops in which case they might as well not be deployed.
The lawnmower-sized contraptions can easily be defeated in urban warfare. The German tank commander Rommel remarked that he had yet to see a tank trap that could stop any of his Mark IV tanks. Walls in streets erected from bricks and other materials will stop these "lawnmowers". Back to the barricades!
I do not yet see any defenses against drones unless the insurgents get hold of ground-to-air missiles. They are still the Achilles Heel of urban uprisings. Ergo: there are no new threats, not yet.
Perhaps you've read my book, Willing Slaves.
Not Whore Slave of Rome, Employee.
Not Whore Slave of Rome, Wall Street Banker and Investor
Not Whore Slave of Rome, Taxpayer.
They already have Iris Scans planned for the thing the Europeans call, The Future. Eventually for a child to even enter into the schools of the Europeans they will have to have their Iris Scanned. Eventually their DNA on file. These people are to ignorant to even figure out all they are living in upon the Earth is a Slave system.
Not Whore Slave of Rome, Free.
Not Whore Slave of Rome, American
Life is good. What an experience! It's always best to forgive.
The great advantage of robots is that they have no ethical/moral component. Their great vulnerability is the electronic brain which can be deregulated from the outside.
Humans will not stand a chance against AI. Perhaps it is the next step in human evolution... our own extinction through invention. I am certain that the electronic brains will be well 'shielded' against outside influence.
The apparently successful cyberattack on the uranium-enrichment centrifuges of Iran makes me think that robots can be defeated even by computer-geeks without government support once a robot-computer gets into the hands of electronic tinkerers. I am also certain that the Russians and Chinese already have the ground-to-air missiles that can destroy the slow-flying drones. These governments will not give them to the Taliban for a variety of reasons; foremost to keep our government guessing about their efficiency. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have shown a huge vulnerability of the robot-tanks: LED's!
An even simpler technique that is already available in principle was used by Allied bombers in WW2 to neutralize the German "Freya" radar system: millions of small pieces of tinfoil that reflected the radar signal before it could reach the planes! I can imagine people showering such tinfoil from the rooftops on robots instead of boiling oil! Or home-made Panzerfausts.
The tinfoil may not work in this case but here is another strategy for urban defense against the ground-robots. Make sure that you have the tools to open every fire-hydrant in the city. The robots will drown unless they are attended by enough soldiers to close the hydrants. I am not kidding. Imaginative defenses even by lightly armed or unarmed groups will always be found.
When robots or any man-free vehicle is deployed, strategies on location are worked out long time in advance. Only if they deem it necessary will they hire up more programmers to exploit for technological advancements. I'm not saying that you're necessarily wrong but I wouldn't take anything for granted.
The unspoken, incredibly arrogant assumption behind all this enthusiasm for the robots is that they will be used against poor brown people who have no resources to fight back with effective weaponry of their own.
I sure miss the cold war days when the USAns knew that if they fucked with anyone in the third world who the Soviet Union might regard as an ally, and Kruschev or Brezhnev were in a bad mood, the SS-18's with 25 megaton warheads would be on the way, and they and everyone they loved would be reduced to wisps of vapor rising the stratosphere in a mushroom cloud within minutes. That kept the fear of God (or more accurately, fear of the people) in these cowardly pentagon thugs.
I don't understand why you still think that these weapons are intended to be used against "poor brown people". They are intended to be used against YOU.
There are unfortunately plenty of human soldiers willing to sign up to kill "poor brown people", but there will be significantly less willing to sign up to kill Americans. That is what the robots will be ultimately intended for. To keep you in line.
Time to have another viewing of the Lucas movie, THX1138. It covers most of ideas that we are currently experiencing. He didn't predict robot killers, but went one better and included robot cops in his film. This film puts all the star war stuff to shame.
Slaves to technology. That's what consumerist societies have become. Same goes for the military. If the darn thing can be built then it's a must have, regardless of cost. In an ever materialistic culture, independence of mind is a thing of the past, a luxury hardly anyone cares to afford. As technology advances the willing herds follow as if lacking in the freedom not to be trapped in its relentless march.
Militarily, the neurotic push for meaner, faster, more efficient weapons manned by artificial intelligence are a Utopian dream to the purveyors of consumerist societies and permanent war. War will be marketed as "cleaner", efficiently sanitized of so much of the messy mayhem and destruction it necessarily produces. Not only will the docile consumer civilians be neatly kept in the dark about much of what takes place in the battlefield of military conflicts, but now even the soldiers themselves, further removed from the actual location of war, can engage "the enemy" from a safe distance and be home in time for dinner and their favorite prime time sitcom. Who knew that the military's incessant war gaming addiction would have resulted in "the cure" for PTSD with the merger of artificial intelligence and weapons of mass murder. Once the modern marvel weaponry is powered down
it's out of sight, out of mind.
Wars should only be fought if the leaders deeming them "necessary" lead the battle, using the most primitive weapons possible so they have to look their enemy in the eye before killing or being killed by them. (I'm against war, but I'm really disgusted by cowards' wars.) And they should also be willing to send their own offspring into battle.
Drug sniffing surveilance minibots.Camera carrying aerial nanobotic "insects".Cyborg binary insect drones (camera carrying)surveilance vehicles.Tom Joad and Johnathan Edwards are probably right,these will be used on u.s. sheeple and armed aerial robotic drones are most likely deployed on border duty now.
Don't these warmongers know that they have no patent on ruthless brutality.They will inherit a legacy of rage.Reaction from generations of orphans whose families have been brutalised by U.S.state sponsored terrorism .And they can build robots too.
peace
Can we get this right for once. These are not robots, they are remote controlled vehicles with weapons on board. The drones are remote controlled planes that fire when the operator tells them too. The day we will know they are truly robots is when the major news story for the day is how a true robot using AI decides to kill an enemy combatant. The military will hype it, but then the next story will be how a robot killed innocent people through a malfunction of hardware or software and then the finger pointing will start.
Interesting that at this point in life the most talked about and most advanced levels of robotics are for killing people in direct opposition to the fictional depictions of machines not being allowed to harm humans. Instead of the humble servant/slave robot to help us with chores, protect us from harm, care for the sick, provide cheap manual labor, we've got an expensive toy that tries to clean our floors..... really?
"Robot" is a nice short for "remote controlled vehicles" and "drones" for "remote controlled planes". Or should we now enrich our language with RCV's and RCP's? Or, taken together as "RSVP's"?
I don't know the acronyms but A.I. is next and true robotic weapons.Does anyone remember the sci-fi writer who wrote a code of ethics for robots like" do no harm to Natural life forms" was it Heinlein,Asimov,Herbert?
It seems that an awful lot of science fiction becomes reality relatively soon.
peace
The idea that A.I. will be able to out-think/outcompete humans in real world conditions is another stretch. A.I. will not occur inside a tactical warfare robot's 'brain', it will happen in a mainframe with little to no capacity to translate this A.I. into external action without, once again, human oversight.
Secondly, when the humans in charge of the machines become overly dependent on the enhanced capabilities and decision making of machines, they will become vulnerable... perhaps to some degree to their own machines, but more likely, other more self-sufficient humans.
"The idea that A.I. will be able to out-think/outcompete humans in real world conditions is another stretch. A.I. will not occur inside a tactical warfare robot's 'brain', it will happen in a mainframe with little to no capacity to translate this A.I. into external action without, once again, human oversight. "
I disagree entirely friend! True robots, with some form of AI, and autonomy, already temporarily leave the control/communication of their operators on missions of all sorts. Especially in the world's oceans. (Hint hint see my below post)I might be nitpicking a little, but robots making decisions on their own when not in communication with their operators is a kind of intelligence. Given a large enough set of parameters for making autonamous decisions, the robots will no doubt make "mistakes" sometime in the near future.
fixie
RE: "with some form of AI, and autonomy, already temporarily leave the control/communication of their operators"
Programmed still within very narrow parameters.
We're just going to sit by, and watch as the robots develop their human independent systems, or humans will themselves invent and program an anti-human killer horde... is that what it is? Sounds a bit too much like T2 or the Matrix.
Not trying to knock your point, but true A.I. that even resembles human thought is still far off, if not a will-o'-the-wisp... our human consciousness relies on moral thinking, which comes from a deep urge to live. Despite our fanciful anthropomorphications, and characters like da Termanator and hal, machines will never have such an urge at their core. Sure, it could be programmed into a machine, but it will still be an automatic, not endemic response.
Asimov's Revised Laws of Robotics (1985)
Zeroth Law:
A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
First Law:
A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm, unless this would violate the Zeroth Law of Robotics.
Second Law:
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the Zeroth or First Law.
Third Law:
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the Zeroth, First, or Second Law.
Nice post!
Relative to the betterment of the human race.
"It does not compute"
Now check this out, relative to US espionage on the UN, and host countries of US Embassies worldwide provided by wiki-leaks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/28/us-embassy-cables-spying-un
I guess I thought the Star Trek Borgs were imaginary.....
and much to my surprise.....
Here Come da Borgs, Here Come da Borgs
So what happens to these "remote controlled Robots" when the Satellites that operate them are taken out ?
They become useless against any major power meaning they are not intended for such.
They can only be used against groups that lack the means and technology to take out the Satellites.
This leaves the peoples of the third world and The US Citizen. Now it a fact that no nation in the third world a threat to the USA Militarily so implicit in the suggestion that "Robots make war safer" is "The United States will continue its course of aggression against third world countries and will invest billions in the technology to do so" These are not about "defense".
To paraphrase a comment from the invasion of Afghanistan "what sense does it make to use a 250,000 dollar missile to blow up a 2 dollar tent"?
And we still have people who insist that the USA must cut Social spending because they can not afford programs to feed the hungry or keep people out of poverty.
As if this technology were even necessary to defeat the will of the people (US, or third world). Most of what we fear has already been accomplished without it.
Sure, it drives the point home, but it neither is the factor that will finish us, or that will stop us from ultimately standing up and taking the power back, once the true humans of conscience have woken up and decided once and for all to do so.
Your analysis is good.
Although, I personally think that A.I. is rapidly becoming reality. These will simply roam the streets and fire on anything not having the correct RFID tag embedded into the base of the skull.
I can imagine such machines will be released on-masse to in a city to enforce 24hour curfews on a local population. Some locals will steal the magnetic identification tag from the bodies of fallen US soldiers, and use them to freely move about the city in search of water or food. Such people will be designated as terrorists (or perhaps a new name with similar connotations). Then the US will respond to this situation deregistering from the global robotic database any RFID tag from soldiers who fail to communicate with the base within a certain period of time. Then the terrorists will come to know that they have 10 - 20 minutes in which to use a fallen soldier's RFID. Later the US will install an RFID destruct device in the skulls of soldiers, and it will destroy the RFID whenever the soldier's heartbeat fails. But then, thats just my imagination.
Personally, I'm waiting for the remote controlled mine sniffing dolphins in space.
"The final war won’t have a name because it will be global governance unabashedly unleashed against the people it has systematically enslaved"
I wrote an essay about the irony of using advanced technology for warfare over perceived scarcity related to this topic:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
From the beginning:
Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious. ...
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
Its a fundamental miscalculation of the human animal to invest in security when it should be investing in a much wider range of helpful behavior.
This is most likely due to a logical prioritization during the early period of human evolution, when earth was bountiful, but competition was fierce, and often a more valid threat to survival. Spending time gathering what nature amply provided was less essential an activity than simply learning to be tougher than the competition. In more isolated areas, where competition was less intense, and where resources were scarce enough, cooperative cultures had the chance to flourish.
In later periods, those cultures that survived by force did so at the expense of cultures who relied more heavily on cooperative behavior. Natural efficiency, though hiding an eventual catch-22, necessitated the rising of this brutal paradigm once civilization arose to prominence, and geographical isolation disappeared.
It is 'evil' perhaps, but more or less inevitable I think. The tough period/question is what we do now that the catch-22 stage has arrived.
Is UNSELFISH L O V E too alarming for humans to try?Or are we--almost all–- too lazy to work for this unutterable challenge?
>>>> War would be a lot safer, the Army says, if only more of it were fought by robots.
And a LOT MORE PROFITABLE, which is the real driver of this technology.
Yeah, l miss he smell of napalm in the morning; now there was the smell of freedom or the joy of watching the night sky light up while carpet bombing. This taking out insurgents one at a time is for wimps, what we need to win is good old fashioned genocide.
That was an interesting comment about letting the fire hydrants loose on the robots. It does seem that no matter how hi-tech something is, there is always an overlooked low tech problem. I guess it's like the O rings on the Challenger.
Perhaps this explains the nations lack of interest in an educational system. Maybe the new " robber barons" will be those game players with really fast hand-eye coordination.
This will put a lot of soldiers out of work too, and as Blackwater/Xe seems to have a lot of guns etc. disappear on a regular basis, then I suppose that robots will disappear as well.
Maybe every citizen will get a cute little R2D2 that works around the house and spies on them at the same time.
Einstein could be wrong about WW III; it won't be fought with rocks and stones , but rarther with robots and drones. The rocks and stones will be what's left.
All the video game playing is going to pay off after all. :-S
I obscenity in the milk of their forefathers!
This type of autonomy is exactly why I got out robot development. I saw the trajectory for what I was working on headed toward weaponization instead of peaceful scientific purposes. One of the paragraphs in this report was especially chilling for me!
To think that some kid in a shipping container in Florida can execute another human being on the other side of the world!
No doubt these devices are being used already within our borders. I once thought the projection of power would become much more difficult as fossil fuel resources became more scarce, but now I think that roboticization will make it much easier for them.
fixie
Somebody send a bus load of robotic tribbles to the pentagon.
The idea is that the people running the machines OVER HERE, are safer than the machines, OVER THERE.
But we live on ONE PLANET. Eventually resources run out as the population increases.
Eventually the people running the machines have to deal with that issue. They will either try to kill everyone to lower the population, or have to build robots that create resources out of nanotechnology.
"They will either try to kill everyone to lower the population, or have to build robots that create resources out of nanotechnology."
Nanotechnology won't last without enough oil.