3 ms·

How are guns not robots?

• jjulius 4y ago
  I'll bite - what makes a gun a robot?
• tmptmpgo 4y ago
  It’s a fair point. I suppose the distinction is whether the robot makes the decision to fire on its own.
  • notatoad 4y ago
    that is not the issue in question here. SFPD wants to deploy remote-controlled weaponry - an officer would still be . IMHO it's a pretty fine disinction between a remote-operated gun and a gun that needs to be held by a human hand. (to be clear, i think police should have fewer guns regardless of how the trigger gets pulled)
    • tmptmpgo 4y ago
      That was kind of my point. When a “robot” with a gun controlled by a human, is it really fundamentally different from an efficient Rube Goldberg machine that fires a gun gun. Some commentators are saying that by removing the safety of the operator from the equation changes things. Sure, it alters the ethics, but that doesn’t change the nature of machine itself.
• Alupis 4y ago
  A machine and a robot are not the same thing. A firearm is a machine. We even have so-called "Machine Guns". All firearms require external input to operate, and cannot operate autonomously. You can affix a firearm to a robot, however the firearm still requires input to operate.