You can't appeal to robots for mercy or empathy - or punish them afterwards. CHRIS COADYFrom The Independent:
In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the 21st century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy: picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blasting a truck and muttering: "Hasta la vista, baby." But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield – with barely anyone back home noticing.
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My Comment: The key paragraph in this report is the following, and it sums up perfectly the direction that we are going ....
.... 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. ....
1 comment:
a bit misleading article, no?
most of the drones used today are unarmed, and used purely for surveilance
the ones that do have weapons are always human-controlled, or at least when it comes to the actual employment of weapons
drones actually making autonomous decisions on when to shoot won't happen for decades, until AI has reached an acceptable level
at which point we'll hopefully be able to detect weapons and explosives with high effectiveness, minimizing the need for human input
hell, drones might be even "cleaner" at war than humans: they have no forgiveness, but no hate either
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