Ah, remember the days when it was hand to hand combat with steel swords and axes and shields, blood spurting everywhere, making a man who survived feel like a man? Good times, good times…
When the US invaded Iraq in 2003, they had no robots as part of their force. By the end of 2005, they had 2,400. Today, they have 12,000, carrying out 33,000 missions a year. A report by the US Joint Forces Command says autonomous robots will be the norm on the battlefield within 20 years.
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Every time you hear about a “drone attack” against Afghanistan or Pakistan, that’s an unmanned robot dropping bombs on human beings. Push a button and it flies away, kills, and comes home. Its robot-cousin on the battlefields below is called SWORDS: a human-sized robot that can see 360 degrees around it and fire its machine-guns at any target it “chooses”. Fox News proudly calls it “the GI of the 21st century.” And billions are being spent on the next generation of warbots, which will leave these models looking like the bulky box on which you used to play Pong.
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This is “one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human warfare,” according to PW Singer, a former analyst for the Pentagon and the CIA, in his must-read book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Defence in the Twenty-First Century. [...] The earlier technologies made it possible for humans to decide to kill in more “sophisticated” ways – but once you programme and unleash an autonomous robot, the war isn’t fought by you any more: it’s fought by the machine. The subject of warfare shifts.
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While “we” will lose fewer people at first by fighting with warbots, this way of fighting may well catalyse greater attacks on us in the long run. US army staff sergeant Scott Smith boasts warbots create “an almost helpless feeling…. It’s total shock and awe.” But while terror makes some people shut up, it makes many more furious and determined to strike back.Imagine if the beaches at Dover and the skies over Westminster were filled with robots controlled from Torah Borah, or Beijing, and could shoot us at any time. Some would scuttle away – and many would be determined to kill “their” people in revenge.
And what about the day captured robots start being reprogrammed to attack the attacker?
I for one, would like to welcome our future machine overlords.
Too bad everybody ignores Asimov.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Oh yeah, nothing like having a safe distance between you and your victim.
I’m for just about anything that advances research into robotics, but the idea of an all robotic infantry, now that’s even stupider than the atomic bomb.
#23
Oh yeah, nothing like having a safe distance between you and your victim.
You mean you and your opponent who is trying to kill you.
I’m for just about anything that advances research into robotics, but the idea of an all robotic infantry, now that’s even stupider than the atomic bomb.
Check. Tell that to the soldiers that were stationed on Okinawa in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Tell that to the men that fought at Iwo Jima which was thought to be small potatoes compared to main island of Japan. I doubt they thought A-bomb was a stupid idea. Further, I doubt the soldiers in the field taking fire would complain about sending in a robot in their stead.
How come no completely remote-control tanks?