Posted on 02/14/2016 2:56:05 PM PST by C19fan
Killer robots that can execute without human intervention will become a reality within years unless there is a global agreement to ban them, warns a leading scientist. Wendell Wallach, an ethicist at Yale University, will today call on the US government to outlaw such machines on the basis they violate international humanitarian law. Wallach also warns that technology has become so advanced that a robot capable of killing humans on its own volition will soon become a possibility - much like the rogue machines seen in Arnold Schwarzenegger's hit film, The Terminator.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
If it can hunt down humans and kill them, it should be smart enough to know when it is about to run out of power and find a safe out-of-the-way place to recharge.
Sorry, you are quite wrong. Here is what we already have right now, well beyond testing. A solar-electric helicopter big enough to carry guns and missiles, that can fly for an hour every day if it can land and recharge its batteries. It can operate completely autonomously. This is a suggested mission profile as it exists today. Not conjecture, this exists today.
It will find its own secret hidey-hole to recharge batteries. Every day at a certain hour, when it “thinks” (based on its send-off programming) that enemy armored vehicles are usually on the move. It will go out and hunt for enemy vehicles that match its on-board profile, and kill them. Then it find a hiding place to rest in the sun until tomorrow.
If it doesn’t find any enemy vehicles in its target profile, it will adapt the times/tactics until it finds them. 23 hours of a day it resting, recharging from sunlight when available. Then it can go hunting again. On its own.
This already exists and is well past the testing phase, so don’t blather about wacko authors fomenting unrealistic fears.
The only thing preventing this from being operational is a political decision, in the end. It already exists. For now, it is run like a predator, with a team looking out of its camera eyeball and making the shoot decisions. But there is no technical hurdle to it being put into combat on a fully autonomous basis.
And the anti-armored-vehicle target profile is just one of many. It could just as easily be programmed to hunt enemy soldiers, or for that matter, any individual human. It would just land in the target area, and go hunting when it was charged up, then find a hiding place to rest.
It already exists. Sorry to burst your bubble. And if we have them, so do the Chinese and Russians. Using them is just a political decision.
People would be shocked at the sensor systems we already have in place. Adding a weapon systems to some of these platforms is trivial and has already been tested. AS you pointed out, the only thing keeping them grounded are political considerations. There are already loads of people, civilians and military, chomping at the bit to use them.
If “terminator” killer robots are outlawed, only outlaws will have “terminator” killer robots.
We need to start developing guns that can shoot close/mid range EMP pulses.
Funny!
Honey West!
You have as much chance of banning those autonomous killers as you do banning warfare.
In the NH debate Ted Cruz made the good suggestion that we should harden our electric grid against EMPs.
Amazes me that Mars Rovers have been working since 1997 with vast improvement at each new implementation by JPL and yet we see such comments,
Recently a Hungarian Univ. group working on a shoestring budget developed from cheap off the shelf components autonomous small drone swarm behavior. There’s a youtube video of it. Once that sort of work is done along with power source, platform, sensor, and weapons package add-ons are easy. And it’s scalable from mosquito size on up. I suspect that proven results are sufficiently advanced that red team are or have begun working on defensive measures and doctrine.
Now, about that Zika outbreak....mosquitos, really?
I recall seeing a movie about this...It was not a Happily-Ever-After type movie.
No more qualms about shooting, no more drone “pilots” to get the guilts.
Yep.
Make them COTS and they are even pretty deniable, so you can let them loose and swear you have nothing to do with them. Which lowers the use threshold.
“We need to start developing guns that can shoot close/mid range EMP pulses.”
Contrary to popular Internet legend, EMP isn’t this “destroy all thing electronic and electrical”. heck, if it were, you wouldn’t survive (your very heartbeat relies on electrical impulses). EMP may disrupt something but it doesn’t destroy it unless it is connected to very long wires that can absorb the pulse over very long distances. EMP lasts a few milliseconds and it over. It doesn’t hang around forever like those on the Internet claim. It is a very brief electrical pulse that is actually very weak.
Another mission profile that has been mentioned to me, already existing everything:
A bird-sized and bird-appearing drone that is launched to sit in a tree or on a roof across the street from the target’s address.
It just sits there looking all day at the driveway and porch and doors, looking for its target face. While it waits, it recharges with it’s little solar wings.
It can wait for months. When it sees its target face, it lifts off, swoops in, and explodes a grenade in it’s face.
The more degrees of separation, the more abuse.
“Gosh, I only guarded the Jews from leaving the concentration camps! I didn’t do the actual killing!”
What are the odds that the Russians or Chinese have a battlefield weapon that switches off or glitches out enough of our high-tech battlefield electronics to take away our digital edge?
If a battlefield can be forced back to 1950 Korea, even locally, we lost bigtime.
“It can wait for months. When it sees its target face, it lifts off, swoops in, and explodes a grenade in it’s face.”
Other mounted technologies doing the same thing is very disturbing: “See, the mounted sniper rifle only shoots the intended target identified by facial and other physiological recognition criteria. If you aren’t the bad guy e need dead you have no problems, see.”
Imagine these killing systems mounted all over the place.
“Look, I just designed the platform, they didn’t tell me...”
“Look, I just wrote the code, they didn’t tell me...”
“Look” etc etc
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