7 ms·

An Estonian company developing unmanned weaponized ground vehicles

46 points by antpls 8y ago

qha 8y ago
That's very cool. It also goes to show that if the US doesn't do it, then someone else will. I don't know how SV liberals think of these vehicles being used by Russia or China. Not trying to stir the pot or anything, just showing the possible consequences of the actions we've seen in the past months.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  A true tragedy of the commons. I'm pessimistic that we would be capable of an international ban without rogue states and loopholes. We'll probably end up developing quasi-peacetime technology that could be co-opted for military purposes.
  - epicureanideal 8y ago
    Yeah, this type of thing seems very easy to disguise as police or riot control equipment, and then just swap the gun from rubber bullets to real bullets if a war starts.
- dullgiulio 8y ago
  Estonia is a NATO country, just for the record.
fromthestart 8y ago
I'm torn between the awesomeness and the morality of working on such a project.
- imustbeevil 8y ago
  I wonder what kind of military technology is acceptable in today's standards of morality. This is just a drone. It's not autonomous. It's a remote control car with weapons or radars mounted on top, controlled by a human looking through a camera. The military use case would be to reduce the possibility of human casualties. Not sure how better to word this. I literally do not understand what kind of military technology is acceptable. Is the common position that no war should exist, no guns should exist, no conflict should exist, and anyone else anywhere in the world that wants to hurt other people should be allowed to without repercussion? Is the idea that if we don't invest in military technology countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia will just make batteries and toys? What is the position I'm supposed to be aligned with?
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    More accurately, it’s to reduce casualties for the military that uses them. It’s intended to increase casualties for the enemy. Edit: it’s hard to reply when you keep editing your comments. It’s now quite different to your original post, though this comment does mostly make sense.
    - imustbeevil 8y ago
      But that's what war is. I would imagine it's easier, and less of a risk to all humans involved on both sides, to create drones with non-lethal capabilities than to send non-lethal human forces into warzones. Edit: I added the second paragraph to my original comment within 3 minutes of posting it, as I noticed there wasn't much hope of getting a response without fleshing out the question. I now have to choose between adding an additional reply to contend with the idea that I "keep editing my comments", or to edit this comment to deal with that additional claim.
      - coldcode 8y ago
        I wonder though if the future will turn into the Star Trek episode where people are "killed" by an AI and then voluntarily submit to suicide. If war is too non-lethal it doesn't solve the reason for the war in the first place and eventually will lead to lethality anyway. As Sherman said "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." Perhaps more effort should go into eliminating the reason for war in the first place, which is of course easier said than done.
        epicureanideal 8y ago
        Hopefully it would be more like... eventually technology becomes so dominant on the battlefield that without it it’s just suicide. So as soon as one side’s drones are wiped out, they just surrender. Although I suppose many countries would continue to resist in a Gandhi-like moral appeal to the victor’s population to stop the slaughter.
- drharby 8y ago
  Theres nothing immoral about weapons development. Warfare and its plagues has an always been a human problem. Unless it violates personal beliefs akin to any conscientious objector. I say this on a technology forum because, while i am a technologist now, i worked a past career doing weapons tech with bright and moral people. Weapons tech development has an always been a scary realm bc any force/battlefield superiority almost ALWAYS results in its use...anf subsequent loss of life, combatant and otherwise. Its a best of the worst kind of scenerios.
  - perfmode 8y ago
    (Genuinely curious about how different people become confident in their moral and ethical convictions.) Weapons development is not immoral because we have always waged war?
    - rjf72 8y ago
      There's a great paradox with weapons. Imagine a world where somehow we agreed to stop development of any and all things that could be even somewhat effectively used as weapons, all the way down to the butter knife. The problem you've created now is that if we have just a single person decide to go against this and start developing weapons he would be able to forcefully impose his will as he saw fit with very little that could be done about it. And this is even worse when you take the analog away from individuals and consider it in terms of nations. Imagine one nation goes this direction. Now suddenly this one nation, which is probably a bit below par on the ethics meter, would suddenly be able to forcefully impose its will on the entirety of the world. This means that it is a paradoxical imperative for ethical nations to maintain and develop as powerful of weapons as they can, even when they have absolutely 0 intent on ever using those weapons. Because otherwise, they risk falling victim to the lowest common denominator that does intend to use them. In reality this all gets really messed up, because as the person you were responding to said weapons almost invariably end up being utilized, often amorally, regardless of the player considered. So you're left in a scenario where if you don't develop weapons then you risk conceding the world to the least ethical player there is, yet if you do develop weapons then you are all but accepting that they will probably be used in an unethical fashion at some point. Two pretty awful decisions, but I think one is worse than the other.
- tdeck 8y ago
  "But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people." https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/ https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/
exabrial 8y ago
My prediction is the largest market for this will be Arab armies. Unit cohesion is the biggest problem they face and they usually abandon their equipment when faced with force. [1] * [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk4Yu42g0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk4Yu42g0I
- mads 8y ago
  My Father was in Africa and in the middle east in the 50'ies and 60'ies. I remember him telling about how arabs would usually take off their boots and flee the scene in combat situations. I assumed he was joking, but maybe not...
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    Fleeing from combat I get, it’d probably be my instinct too. But why take your boots off? I personally run faster in shoes.
    - freedomben 8y ago
      Would it be out of place to assume you haven't experimented much with barefoot running? What you say is intuitive, but in my personal experience incorrect. It took about 6 months for my body to adjust, but now running barefoot is far superior (or with minimalist shoes like the VFFs)
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        I wear VFFs daily, have for about half a decade at this point. On uneven ground in a combat zone, littered with god knows what and where a broken ankle might mean death? Boots please.
        freedomben 8y ago
        > I wear VFFs daily, have for about half a decade at this point. In that case, I would be out of place to assume you haven't experimented much with barefoot running :-) > On uneven ground in a combat zone, littered with god knows what and where a broken ankle might mean death? Boots please. That is a good point, tho I don't see boots making you faster , but I concede that the ankle support and steel toes would certainly be safer, and you're gonna be a lot slower with a broken ankle. So I still think barefoot you'd be faster, tho certainly less safe. If I were fleeing in battle, I might would rather gamble my safety for some speed, but it's probably highly situational. I suspect I've just wasted a lot of time analyzing a very unlikely scenario :-)
baq 8y ago
When AIs wage war against each other in the real, what are humans supposed to do?
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Avoid crossfire.
- afarrell 8y ago
  Try to avoid being ethnically cleansed by whoever owns the AIs and wants the Ukranian wheat fields or Baku oil fields.
- craigsmansion 8y ago
  Why, watch it on television, of course; take bets in the pub. Imagine it. Two fully automated, autonomous armies, duking it out, no one getting hurt. Those with the best engineering and software win! Winner takes all, but at that point, what is there to take? Resources? Land? The only thing left is the vanquished enemy's automated military tech and their engineers and programmers. And the end-game? One peaceful world government under our no doubt Estonian overlords. It will be Battlebots...for keeps!
afarrell 8y ago
I've read the book The Dictators Handbook (watch the CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers[1] for a good summary) and I can imagine a number of really clear and compelling Job Stories for this technology: * As a ruler facing large-scale protests, I want to clear the crowds of people from the streets without deploying soldiers who might choose to actually side with the protestors. * As a ruler who is afraid of a coup, I want to reduce the personnel-management costs of maintaining my military so that I can reduce the number of officers needed to maintain the same level of force lethality. This will let me purge my officer corps of possibly-disloyal members and lavish rewards on those who remain. * As a ruler from an ethnic/religious minority, I want to restrict membership in the military to that minority without reducing its lethality so that I can prevent members of the majority from having trained members who could seize power or resist marginalization. Technological advances like quinine and the Madsen and Maxim Gun allowed fewer than 1,000 Europeans[2] under Belgian King Leopold to spread the benefits[3] of civilization to The Congo, an area more than 3 times the size of Texas. I am excited to see the world that these new advances will usher in. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Publique#Under_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Publique#Under_the_Congo... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Mutilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Mutilation (although yes, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#War_with_Arab_slavers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#War_with_Arab...)
- rightbyte 8y ago
  Wont the risk for officer rebellion increase with decreased size of the chore? Even so, it's probably more likely that some murder bot engineers rebell against the ruler than thousands of soldiers and officers who have a harder time organizing than a smaller group. Obviously, this apply for 'evil' rebells vs 'good' governments too. I would not like to have a single point of failure murder bot army as garrisons.
- HillRat 8y ago
  As a bonus, developing-world tyrants usually have poor logistical and maintenance capabilities, so PMCs and defense contractors have the option of long-tail contracts for supply, maintenance, and upgrades as well, reducing the risk of regime elements going rogue with the murderbot army. It’s really a win-win for murderous ethnonationalist authoritarianism and unfettered global capitalism!
brd 8y ago
The US was researching comparable systems (and smaller) back in the mid 2000s. I knew a few people involved in those programs and seriously considered joining. Things went very quiet on that front, I've heard no news on those programs in years. I don't know if that means they continued behind closed doors or were put on indefinite pause. This is the best article I could find on the subject which gives some background as to what derailed the program. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/what-killed-the-robot-soldier/ http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/what-killed-...
erikpukinskis 8y ago
See also: Black Mirror S04E05 “Metalhead” which coincidentally aired exactly one year ago today. https://youtu.be/xpbRBTVVAwc https://youtu.be/xpbRBTVVAwc (Featurette)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
antpls 8y ago
You can look on YouTube on weaponized version : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTpGhAx-NbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTpGhAx-NbY
- rfreytag 8y ago
  Watching this I can see a UN Convention on Autonomous Weapons is inevitable.
  - drivingmenuts 8y ago
    All wars should be autonomous vehicles vs autonomous vehicle. A pile of scrap is better than a pile of bodies.
    - vbuwivbiu 8y ago
      and the next step from there is simply to simulate those wars
      - pault 8y ago
        This was a plot in one of the Culture novels by Iain Banks. Two civilizations decide to settle a dispute by fighting simulated wars in VR. Very interesting story.
        KineticLensman 8y ago
        > one of the Culture novels by Iain Banks 'Surface Detail' [0], by Iain M. Banks (the author uses 'Iain Banks' for non-SF work). > Two civilizations decide to settle a dispute by fighting simulated wars in VR. The war is between 'pro-hell' and 'anti-hell' supporters (hells are virtual environments where uploaded individuals can be subjected to eternal damnation). The war is a massive set of campaigns in various virtual environments with the loser agreeing to accept the overall result as a binding result. Things go wrong when one side begins to lose the virtual war and decides to escalate it into the Real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail

46 points by antpls 8y ago

qha 8y ago

That's very cool. It also goes to show that if the US doesn't do it, then someone else will. I don't know how SV liberals think of these vehicles being used by Russia or China. Not trying to stir the pot or anything, just showing the possible consequences of the actions we've seen in the past months.

tcbawo 8y ago
A true tragedy of the commons. I'm pessimistic that we would be capable of an international ban without rogue states and loopholes. We'll probably end up developing quasi-peacetime technology that could be co-opted for military purposes.
- epicureanideal 8y ago
  Yeah, this type of thing seems very easy to disguise as police or riot control equipment, and then just swap the gun from rubber bullets to real bullets if a war starts.
dullgiulio 8y ago
Estonia is a NATO country, just for the record.

fromthestart 8y ago

I'm torn between the awesomeness and the morality of working on such a project.

imustbeevil 8y ago
I wonder what kind of military technology is acceptable in today's standards of morality. This is just a drone. It's not autonomous. It's a remote control car with weapons or radars mounted on top, controlled by a human looking through a camera. The military use case would be to reduce the possibility of human casualties. Not sure how better to word this. I literally do not understand what kind of military technology is acceptable. Is the common position that no war should exist, no guns should exist, no conflict should exist, and anyone else anywhere in the world that wants to hurt other people should be allowed to without repercussion? Is the idea that if we don't invest in military technology countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia will just make batteries and toys? What is the position I'm supposed to be aligned with?
- lostlogin 8y ago
  More accurately, it’s to reduce casualties for the military that uses them. It’s intended to increase casualties for the enemy. Edit: it’s hard to reply when you keep editing your comments. It’s now quite different to your original post, though this comment does mostly make sense.
  - imustbeevil 8y ago
    But that's what war is. I would imagine it's easier, and less of a risk to all humans involved on both sides, to create drones with non-lethal capabilities than to send non-lethal human forces into warzones. Edit: I added the second paragraph to my original comment within 3 minutes of posting it, as I noticed there wasn't much hope of getting a response without fleshing out the question. I now have to choose between adding an additional reply to contend with the idea that I "keep editing my comments", or to edit this comment to deal with that additional claim.
    - coldcode 8y ago
      I wonder though if the future will turn into the Star Trek episode where people are "killed" by an AI and then voluntarily submit to suicide. If war is too non-lethal it doesn't solve the reason for the war in the first place and eventually will lead to lethality anyway. As Sherman said "War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over." Perhaps more effort should go into eliminating the reason for war in the first place, which is of course easier said than done.
      - epicureanideal 8y ago
        Hopefully it would be more like... eventually technology becomes so dominant on the battlefield that without it it’s just suicide. So as soon as one side’s drones are wiped out, they just surrender. Although I suppose many countries would continue to resist in a Gandhi-like moral appeal to the victor’s population to stop the slaughter.
drharby 8y ago
Theres nothing immoral about weapons development. Warfare and its plagues has an always been a human problem. Unless it violates personal beliefs akin to any conscientious objector. I say this on a technology forum because, while i am a technologist now, i worked a past career doing weapons tech with bright and moral people. Weapons tech development has an always been a scary realm bc any force/battlefield superiority almost ALWAYS results in its use...anf subsequent loss of life, combatant and otherwise. Its a best of the worst kind of scenerios.
- perfmode 8y ago
  (Genuinely curious about how different people become confident in their moral and ethical convictions.) Weapons development is not immoral because we have always waged war?
  - rjf72 8y ago
    There's a great paradox with weapons. Imagine a world where somehow we agreed to stop development of any and all things that could be even somewhat effectively used as weapons, all the way down to the butter knife. The problem you've created now is that if we have just a single person decide to go against this and start developing weapons he would be able to forcefully impose his will as he saw fit with very little that could be done about it. And this is even worse when you take the analog away from individuals and consider it in terms of nations. Imagine one nation goes this direction. Now suddenly this one nation, which is probably a bit below par on the ethics meter, would suddenly be able to forcefully impose its will on the entirety of the world. This means that it is a paradoxical imperative for ethical nations to maintain and develop as powerful of weapons as they can, even when they have absolutely 0 intent on ever using those weapons. Because otherwise, they risk falling victim to the lowest common denominator that does intend to use them. In reality this all gets really messed up, because as the person you were responding to said weapons almost invariably end up being utilized, often amorally, regardless of the player considered. So you're left in a scenario where if you don't develop weapons then you risk conceding the world to the least ethical player there is, yet if you do develop weapons then you are all but accepting that they will probably be used in an unethical fashion at some point. Two pretty awful decisions, but I think one is worse than the other.
tdeck 8y ago
"But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people." https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/ https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/

exabrial 8y ago

My prediction is the largest market for this will be Arab armies. Unit cohesion is the biggest problem they face and they usually abandon their equipment when faced with force. [1] * [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk4Yu42g0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk4Yu42g0I

mads 8y ago
My Father was in Africa and in the middle east in the 50'ies and 60'ies. I remember him telling about how arabs would usually take off their boots and flee the scene in combat situations. I assumed he was joking, but maybe not...
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Fleeing from combat I get, it’d probably be my instinct too. But why take your boots off? I personally run faster in shoes.
  - freedomben 8y ago
    Would it be out of place to assume you haven't experimented much with barefoot running? What you say is intuitive, but in my personal experience incorrect. It took about 6 months for my body to adjust, but now running barefoot is far superior (or with minimalist shoes like the VFFs)
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      I wear VFFs daily, have for about half a decade at this point. On uneven ground in a combat zone, littered with god knows what and where a broken ankle might mean death? Boots please.
      - freedomben 8y ago
        > I wear VFFs daily, have for about half a decade at this point. In that case, I would be out of place to assume you haven't experimented much with barefoot running :-) > On uneven ground in a combat zone, littered with god knows what and where a broken ankle might mean death? Boots please. That is a good point, tho I don't see boots making you faster , but I concede that the ankle support and steel toes would certainly be safer, and you're gonna be a lot slower with a broken ankle. So I still think barefoot you'd be faster, tho certainly less safe. If I were fleeing in battle, I might would rather gamble my safety for some speed, but it's probably highly situational. I suspect I've just wasted a lot of time analyzing a very unlikely scenario :-)

baq 8y ago

When AIs wage war against each other in the real, what are humans supposed to do?

village-idiot 8y ago
Avoid crossfire.
afarrell 8y ago
Try to avoid being ethnically cleansed by whoever owns the AIs and wants the Ukranian wheat fields or Baku oil fields.
craigsmansion 8y ago
Why, watch it on television, of course; take bets in the pub. Imagine it. Two fully automated, autonomous armies, duking it out, no one getting hurt. Those with the best engineering and software win! Winner takes all, but at that point, what is there to take? Resources? Land? The only thing left is the vanquished enemy's automated military tech and their engineers and programmers. And the end-game? One peaceful world government under our no doubt Estonian overlords. It will be Battlebots...for keeps!

afarrell 8y ago

I've read the book The Dictators Handbook (watch the CGP Grey video Rules for Rulers[1] for a good summary) and I can imagine a number of really clear and compelling Job Stories for this technology: * As a ruler facing large-scale protests, I want to clear the crowds of people from the streets without deploying soldiers who might choose to actually side with the protestors. * As a ruler who is afraid of a coup, I want to reduce the personnel-management costs of maintaining my military so that I can reduce the number of officers needed to maintain the same level of force lethality. This will let me purge my officer corps of possibly-disloyal members and lavish rewards on those who remain. * As a ruler from an ethnic/religious minority, I want to restrict membership in the military to that minority without reducing its lethality so that I can prevent members of the majority from having trained members who could seize power or resist marginalization. Technological advances like quinine and the Madsen and Maxim Gun allowed fewer than 1,000 Europeans[2] under Belgian King Leopold to spread the benefits[3] of civilization to The Congo, an area more than 3 times the size of Texas. I am excited to see the world that these new advances will usher in. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Publique#Under_the_Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_Publique#Under_the_Congo... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Mutilation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#Mutilation (although yes, also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#War_with_Arab_slavers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State#War_with_Arab...)

rightbyte 8y ago
Wont the risk for officer rebellion increase with decreased size of the chore? Even so, it's probably more likely that some murder bot engineers rebell against the ruler than thousands of soldiers and officers who have a harder time organizing than a smaller group. Obviously, this apply for 'evil' rebells vs 'good' governments too. I would not like to have a single point of failure murder bot army as garrisons.
HillRat 8y ago
As a bonus, developing-world tyrants usually have poor logistical and maintenance capabilities, so PMCs and defense contractors have the option of long-tail contracts for supply, maintenance, and upgrades as well, reducing the risk of regime elements going rogue with the murderbot army. It’s really a win-win for murderous ethnonationalist authoritarianism and unfettered global capitalism!

brd 8y ago

The US was researching comparable systems (and smaller) back in the mid 2000s. I knew a few people involved in those programs and seriously considered joining. Things went very quiet on that front, I've heard no news on those programs in years. I don't know if that means they continued behind closed doors or were put on indefinite pause. This is the best article I could find on the subject which gives some background as to what derailed the program. http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/what-killed-the-robot-soldier/ http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/what-killed-...

erikpukinskis 8y ago

See also: Black Mirror S04E05 “Metalhead” which coincidentally aired exactly one year ago today. https://youtu.be/xpbRBTVVAwc https://youtu.be/xpbRBTVVAwc (Featurette)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

antpls 8y ago

You can look on YouTube on weaponized version : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTpGhAx-NbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTpGhAx-NbY

rfreytag 8y ago
Watching this I can see a UN Convention on Autonomous Weapons is inevitable.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago
  All wars should be autonomous vehicles vs autonomous vehicle. A pile of scrap is better than a pile of bodies.
  - vbuwivbiu 8y ago
    and the next step from there is simply to simulate those wars
    - pault 8y ago
      This was a plot in one of the Culture novels by Iain Banks. Two civilizations decide to settle a dispute by fighting simulated wars in VR. Very interesting story.
      - KineticLensman 8y ago
        > one of the Culture novels by Iain Banks 'Surface Detail' [0], by Iain M. Banks (the author uses 'Iain Banks' for non-SF work). > Two civilizations decide to settle a dispute by fighting simulated wars in VR. The war is between 'pro-hell' and 'anti-hell' supporters (hells are virtual environments where uploaded individuals can be subjected to eternal damnation). The war is a massive set of campaigns in various virtual environments with the loser agreeing to accept the overall result as a binding result. Things go wrong when one side begins to lose the virtual war and decides to escalate it into the Real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_Detail