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Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot
- dilippkumar 7y agoI don't buy this. Given a sufficiently desperate situation, I can't imagine any military with autonomous tanks taking a call to keep the autonomous shooting "disabled" when it would risk actually loosing a war. If anyone had real ethical concerns, they would've not put a gun on a robot to begin with. Once you arm a robot, a software disable is just lipstick on a pig.
- bootlooped 7y agoPredator and Reaper drones are armed, but as far as I know humans always control the weapons systems.
- throwawaycanada 7y agoI guarantee they can be programmed to carry out missions without sending and receiving signals. Otherwise they can always be detected.
- 6nf 7y agoI don’t think you can realistically detect predator - satellite comms
- esmi 7y agoWhy? Obviously the satellite can detect the predator.
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- hvidgaard 7y agoUnless they have a specialized directional antenna, it's simple to triangulate where the source of a signal is with drones.
- 6nf 7y agoThey fly pretty high and the antenna points towards the sky not the ground, and yes they do use specialised antennas. You'd much easier find a predator using radar.
- Nextgrid 7y agoI'd be curious to know how is the latency handled when it comes to aiming & shooting over a satellite connection.
- 6nf 7y agoWatch some of the videos on youtube, it's quite interesting. You can see that the predator is able to target and track automatically so the pilot basically just has to hit the button to fire the weapons and a hit is almost guaranteed. No need to have good reflexes or low latency. The pilots are in Nevada so the best case scenario is probably 100ms pings anyway.
- zurn 7y agohttps://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_pr.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_...
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- michaelt 7y agoI've heard it argued that cruise missiles are robots - at least as much as a Roomba is - and hence that 'killer robots' have been with us for decades.
- onion2k 7y ago"This isn't a new thing! Look we already have this superficially similar thing!" is a common argument in favour of changes to the status quo, especially when people believe the change is negative. It's intellectually dishonest.
- toyg 7y agoAnd already we have all sorts of problems with cruise missiles (fired by mistake, locking on the wrong target, misbehaving in flight...). Increasing the window of risk to ground combat is very, very risky. As the British ex-soldier quoted in TFA, even humans struggle to discern friend from foe in situations like Afghanistan or Iraq, a machine could potentially create clusterfucks of unimaginable proportions. Not that I think someone won’t do it - if it gives even a resemblance of tactical superiority, someone will deploy it, then watch in horror as things go terribly wrong.
- wiz21c 7y agoout of scope, but this made me laugh : >>> clusterfucks of unimaginable proportions
- Gravityloss 7y agoOr missiles. Or torpedoes before that. Also, targeting systems on manned vehicles etc. I do think it can be seen as a spectrum and these are quite more primitive than more autonomous and general ones with longer lifetime.
- hoseja 7y agoOf course, the only problem people have with this boils down to watching too many action movies starring eventual governors of California.
- shpeedy 7y agoMines are simple robots. They kill for decades after a war. Killer tank robot is much less dangerous.
- Nextgrid 7y agoTrue, but it's still a slippery slope. Can't wait for the day where the decision of who to shoot is outsourced to call centre-like environments in India where people will be paid peanuts to decide who lives and dies. /s
- CalRobert 7y agoA mine could be a lot easier to avoid in the long term.
- rishabhsagar 7y ago> Mines are simple robots These tanks are not alternative to mines. Why not take a step back and ban both? Humanity has already been trying to get rid of mines [https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/landmines/ https://www.un.org/disarmament/convarms/landmines/]
- Shivetya 7y agoWe can ban anything we want but countries still make them and force the hands of others to counter it. How many hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons still exist? Just making the illegal more illegal does nothing but mollify a few here and there but certainly lets politicians grand stand as if they accomplished something. Weapons of war deserve no mercy, since these robots will exist then the only logical solution is design systems to take them down. Weapon systems can certain be designed to take down anything mechanical and ignore people. If anything depriving the petty war mongers out there of their weapons to use against people might be the only worthwhile outcome of this technology.
- gonzo41 7y agoThey havn't really been trying that hard. Infact DARPA found a great use for the IOT https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/shm.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/sh...
- tjchear 7y agoOn one hand, I'm pretty excited that something from the universe of Ghost in the Shell would become reality; on the other hand, it's a slippery slope to some dystopian reality where ethical considerations are completely removed from battle.
- remarkEon 7y agoRepeat of WWI, to be honest, with all these technologies clashing together for the first time. There weren't a lot of "ethical considerations" to using chemical weapons when the alternative was losing thousands in another doomed charge out of the trenches. Same with WWII, where the US would rather open Pandora's box of the Nuclear Age than risk a ground invasion of mainland Japan.
- tjchear 7y agoI'll grant you that there weren't much ethical considerations to speak of in the last world wars, and perhaps my naive view has been unrealistically colored by sci-fi TV shows, but my point is simple: a broken autonomous killing system won't know when to stop. Even unethical war makers have affinity to humankind and know when to stop. And despite the meaning implied by the MAD doctrine, it never meant that humans will nuke themselves to oblivion; it simply says a nash equilibrium will be achieved with both conflicting parties staying out of each other's way.
- vidarh 7y agoUnintended consequences certainly gets more and more dangerous the more advanced autonomy these weapons gets. In keeping with your mention of sci-fi, there's a Star Trek Voyager episode where two sides of killer robots continue to wage war against each other after having killed their makers because their makers had agreed on a truce, and their instructions had been to eliminate anyone that prevented them from beating their enemy and hence by agreeing a truce their makers had become an obstacle to achieving their programmed goal. Having done software development my entire life, I'd never trust anyone to manage to avoid every pitfall in guaranteeing you have a foolproof way of making them stop...
- chrismmay 7y agoThat demo where the unmanned tank pointed its gun at the platform full of generals...... talk about your nightmare demo. I’ve done a few and even getting my network connection working at a client site can make me sweat a little when a room full of executives are waiting. I can’t imagine how the engineers felt when their baby went off the reservation like that.
- w4n9r3ntru3 7y agoHaha they did have faith in reinforcement learning or whatever technique they used for training.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoThere is the famous ww2 rocket powered mine that looked like a pair of giant Catharine wheels that was designed to breach defences on d day. When tested it ran amuck and turned back towards the observers
- simon_000666 7y agoThese articles always focus on man vs. machine but war is a great leveler. What happens for example when there is a proxy war and these devices get used? Lets say the US deploys them somewhere for one side but then surely Russia or China or whoever is supporting the other side will deploy their own versions to counter. Will we then end up with a machine vs. machine scenario?
- dave_sullivan 7y agoThis is basically the plot of Horizon Zero Dawn. [Spoilers] Machine swarm vs machine swarm in human proxy war, but then the humans lose the password and can’t access the swarms and they destroy everything.
- vincnetas 7y agoMandatory "You have 20 seconds to comply." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M *That demo with generals probably looked like this :)
- kirillzubovsky 7y agoNever mind the robot, I want the bullet proof glass that never took a dent in that rampage.
- StavrosK 7y agoEven now, 33 years later, that robot is goddamn terrifying. Props to the designers for creating the most disconcerting creature I've seen in all cinema.
- kirillzubovsky 7y agoNo government or regulation can strop entropy, and given the tools and the knowledge, a Robocop is inevitable. The best we can do is prepare the rest of the world to deal with these things, and the time when without a doubt they get hacked, or become self-aware. The question is, what are we going to do?
- AYBABTME 7y agoIf you're being attacked, troops on the ground aren't necessarily better than autonomous robots. Robots don't rape and pillage. An advancing robotic army doesn't incentivize the retreating force in adopting a scorched earth tactic, since the robots don't need buildings to house them, groceries or farms. Maybe I read too much about the Nanking massacre recently, but having it fresh in my mind makes me question whether the often repeated assumption that humans need to be involved, is to be taken at face value. Maybe it's a good idea to keep humans at a safe distance, even if they're actively part of the conflict.
- SandunGunn 7y agoBut we should have 'skin in the game'. Removing the risk, by using robots, lowers the barriers to engage in conflicts and may lead us to behave more aggressively than we would have done otherwise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_94xdbisu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_94xdbisu8
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y agoED-209: Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply. Jones: I think you'd better do what he says, Mr. Kinney. ...