First Armed Robots on Patrol in Iraq 661
An anonymous reader writes "Robots have been roaming Iraq, since shortly after the war began. Now, for the first time — the first time in any war zone — the 'bots are carrying guns. The SWORDS robots, armed with M249 machine guns, "haven't fired their weapons yet," an Army official says. "But that'll be happening soon." The machines have actually been ready for a while, but safety concerns kept them off the battlefield. Now, the robots have kill switches, so "now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," according to the Army. I feel safer already."
Is this from a shitty 90's movie? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://shitsnaz.blogspot.com/2007/07/us-army-gets
" 1995, the movie "Evolver" is released to the public. This piece of shit is about a robot that goes crazy and kills people so it can win at laser tag. At one point, the two protagaonists/high school students of the movie break into a military research facility (!) and watch a video about a top-secret government project for a futuristic military robot. It was called project "SWORDS".
The two acronyms and purposes of the robots are plain to see. It's painfully obvious to me that the Army stays up late and flips back and forth between demiporn on Cinemax and the horrible movies on USA. I can only imagine a researcher dropping his can of "Da Beast" to realize that, yes, there *has* to be a project SWORDS and a killer robot."
Great Idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great Idea (Score:1, Insightful)
If you don't enjoy that kind of work, WHY FOR FUCK'S SAKE would you ENLIST IN THE ARMY?
Erratic behaviour (Score:5, Insightful)
And the only results they have is a simple kill/estop switch, which (and I am guessing) whose command code is probably transmitted along the same comm pathway as the other command codes.
Wow
Simon H
Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:5, Insightful)
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:3, Insightful)
These are not the kinds of robots that would need the 3 laws.
Predators? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:3, Insightful)
A big deal gets made every time the American soldier & marine death count approaches some number... but they can't even get decent estimates on the number of Iraqis killed...
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well that's an easy target. (Score:5, Insightful)
sounds alot like that 'liberal arts' stuff to me (Score:2, Insightful)
for example, you get a lot of things right, but then you say 'armies are not for keeping the peace'. is this the philosophy that led the americans to disband the iraqi army? is this why bush did not want to give authority a single, competent military person in charge of the occupation, or why he wouldnt even call it an occupation? what was so awful about mcarthur and patton after WWII and their occupations of germany and japan? is this why looting and riots broke out because nobody wanted to 'keep the peace'? what exactly was going to happen, then, if the military couldnt do the job of holding the country it had taken over? who was supposed to do that, if not the defense department? the 'keep the peace' department? oh the 'state department'? if that is the case, then what manpower is the state department supposed to use? do you want a bunch of civilians swooping down on a post-war country, while the army goes home, job done? and what is the state department supposed to do when armed militias try to blow up a building? but if state is supposed to be in charge, then why would you second guess a bunch of state department decisions, and mix and match between pentagon and state with various decisions going on after the country was taken over? have you read 'state of denial' or mil blogs or other resources? what do you say about these things?
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a bunch of Green Lantern will-to-victory horseshit. Military strategy does not depend on people at home clapping harder for Tinkerbell to be okay, it depends on manpower, munitions, strategy, and the setting and achieving of CLEAR, REALISTIC GOALS. We lost in Vietnam because no amount of killing people will make them love you and want to be more like you, and you can't fight a guerrilla war with a military - it's a political and social problem that's INTENDED to make miltary operations ineffective.
Dirty fucking hippies back home had jack squat to do with it.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
Then why the fuck are we still in Iraq? Last I checked, Saddam was dead now.
Detonator was a "robot" (Score:4, Insightful)
Artillery projectiles and bombs were "deciding" when to blow up for well over a century now...
Their logic was far more simplistic, of course.
Various traps where harmful "robots" too — mechanisms, designed to kill their intended victim automatically. These traps, and their descendants — land-mines — have killed many thousands of unintended victims since.
Our technology is progressing, and so does the military section of it... Although this weapon is novel, there is nothing new in principle here.
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, looking at the little guy, I have to wonder how it takes a grenade hit... (and whether it could right itself after being tossed on to its side). Seems like a good platform for covering squads with cross fire, and maybe in performing the designated marksman role.
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:3, Insightful)
desperately seeking soldiers... (Score:2, Insightful)
The "fit for military service per capita" figure for the USA is extremely low; something like 0.7%. Most other nations can manage at least 10%.
These figures were from the CIA world fact book circa 2000 ie before 9/11 when the data was pulled out. I doubt that the picture has improved for the USA since then.
So, yes, the USA desperately needs mass production of fighting robots if it is to cope with a ground war.
Re:America Fuck Yeah! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)
rj
Re:sounds alot like that 'liberal arts' stuff to m (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly most of us here are better educated and better at it than most of the young administrators that were sent straight from the "think tanks" halfway through undergraduate college into running things in Iraq. This is the amateur war run by disparate groups pulling in different directions without any central control actually in the same country - at least that is what retired military professionals are telling us.
They did it differently and could actually set and carry out policies without interference and they were not encumbered by unaccountable spooks turning up to play Bond villian without warning.
Easier to hate (Score:3, Insightful)
Easier to hate: An army of faceless scary-ass future-bots who have replaced your disbanded your military and technocratic society.
If there's anything I've learned from SciFi it's this - Controlling robots is awesome, but being controlled by robots results in pissed off people and counter insurgency. (Not that we haven't already hit that milestone without gun toting robots.)
And as jokingly sarcastic as that may be, I'm somewhat serious. I'm all for keeping out troops out of harm's way, but I'm somewhat curious about the blowback that results from being attacked by T-100's. Ground combat robots seem like something that might serve to dehumanize Americans during a time when we really need to do the complete opposite.
Re:Robot to Iraqi: (Score:1, Insightful)
US soldier drops gun.
"19... 18... 17..."
Sorry
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:1, Insightful)
e) Immediately after invading a country, have a real post-invasion plan. Maybe something that that doesn't involve dissolving the army and dumping a half-million angry trained fighters onto the streets. As part of the plan, hit the books to learn a little bit about the risk of sectarian violence that had otherwise been squelched by a brutal dictator before it spirals into a horrific disaster.
These are not robots, people! (Score:2, Insightful)
Obvious improvements (Score:3, Insightful)
2) No armor
3) Easily taken out by a paint ball gun
4) Easily taken out by a sheet
5) Easily taken out by a well thrown egg
6) I suspect these are going to be easily taken out by jamming equipment that would fit in a van.
okay 3-5 are "Has only one eye that is unarmored and mounted pointing forwards"
These cheeseheads seem to think the enemy is going to not attack the weakest spot.
This should have 50 vision systems mounted all over it and easy to switch too. It should probably have three operators to watch to the sides, above and behind. The video feed back should be a composited image from 6 cameras with most of it being the forward mounted camera but some of it being the other cameras so if you see movement you can zoom in.
Armor-- it needs armor. A couple machine gun volleys are going to shred the thing. The video shows them scouting out the sniper who is not allows to fire back at the robots. The bombs over there are flipping Abrahms tanks-- that is a pretty big bomb. The treads look like a couple 50 caliber rounds would disable them.
I think they are great for entering a building and being destroyed after taking out one or two insurgents. They are great for reducing risk at the trade of some dollars. They may be great for breaking enemy lines since you could pin the guys down with gunfire and then run your robots over with grenade launchers or something like that. It's not like the robots are worthless.
But they show typical optimistic "everything will work perfectly and our enemies are stupid as bricks" thinking. What they need to do before letting these things loose is give a group of a dozen smart guys about 500 grand to disable and overcome a squad of these things.
At a minimum, you should not be able to disable one of them for 25% of it's cost.
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the number one goal of military strategy is to set realistic target goals, setup conditions and sub-goals for those goals, and create a coherent strategy which achieves those goals. And then plan out the aftermath of how achieving those goals fit into the larger security concern. The singular and only goal here was the overthrow of Saddam, which happened as quickly and painlessly as predicted. The major failing was that we didn't plan out whatever to do afterwards.
We're not still fighting a war. We won. We saw the banner and everything. Saddam's army fell, and he was deposed. What we're fighting now is a combination of a rebellion and a civil war. And we're woefully underprepared to deal with that.
Suppressing a rebellion is very different than fighting against a standing army. You suppress a rebellion by a combination of making it incredibly dangerous to be a rebel while supplying for people's basic needs enough so that they don't want to rebel. We promised the second one, but have pissed away all the money by hiring expensive and unprepared american contractors to do all the work and pocket huge profit margins. The first one we're moderately good at, but just shooting people alone is a bad way to stop a rebellion.
Especially since any enemy the American military goes up against knows that if they can drag the thing out for more than four or five years, the Americans will pack up and leave due to lack of political support.
If we can afford to just pack up and leave, did we really need to be in the war in the first place? I thought wars were just for life-and-death-of-the-country stuff.
Re:Speculation (Score:1, Insightful)
Politician: "Let's invade Korea"
Voter: "What do you expect the loses to be?"
Politician: "No American will die since we will send in robots."
Voter: "Then why did you interrupt my normal tv program??"
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you call a radio controlled car a robot?
Attach a nerf gun to it. Is it a robot yet?
Attach a machine gun to it. Is it a robot yet?
No, No and No.
Even the SWORDS wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] specifically says that it is not autonomous. Hence, not a robot.
You might get away with calling this a telerobot, but it's really just a fancy remote control tank.
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:5, Insightful)
A robot pissing match. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now the US Army has a great idea. Let's use a robot to shoot and ask questions later in order to save soldiers lives. Now the other guy needs to build his own stronger robot so that it can disable the US robot.
Just imagine. There is a guy on either side of a village square pushing around a joystick driving a robot to fight the other guys robot. Surely at this point even a US commander would start to wonder what the fuck they are doing over there because soon it becomes a pissing match where my robot is bigger than yours.
I love the idea of the kill switch.
US joystick operator aims to kill a group of civilians when suddenly a hand moves past the camera. "Click" the robot freezes. Two more hands in the view now and a wrench. A few minutes later a gun is carried away.
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:3, Insightful)
This robot could enter a room without having to do that. If it gets blown up - well - it's not as bad as losing a man OR as bad as killing civilians. Furthermore, the operator can operate it calmly because his own life isn't on the line, so the shoot / don't shoot decision is a little easier to make.
If this becomes widely deployed it holds the prospect to make urban warfare a lot more humane to the unfortunate civilians that get caught up in the fighting. Like any tool it can undoubtedly be misused, but the fact is that if our guys over there wanted to kill civilians they wouldn't need a little robot to do it for them. If we weren't concerned about civilian casualties we could simply flatten entire cities with artillery like we did in World War 1 and 2. The reason that insurgent tactics work so well is because we're unwilling to do that - as we should be.
I don't hold out much hope for this war getting better, but I hope that in some small way robots like these could reduce the suffering caused.
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine you are a marine. You have a report that some house somewhere might have some insurgents merrily making bombs to go blow up in crowds of Shiites trying to go shopping. You come to a house in a residential neighborhood. You now have two options.
1) You can kick in the door and send in a dozen of heavily armed teenagers scared shitless that a bomb is about to go off or that a dozen armed men are about to ambush them. Like must humans facing the potential for imminent death, they are hopped up on adrenaline and probably more than a little twitchy. Once inside they run the risk of coming face to face with some equally scared armed fellow who think she is defending his family by standing in the doorway with an AK-47 pointed at their face. This is how the majority of civilians get gunned down. Two groups of armed people scared to death of each other come face to face with each other, one side flinches, and before you know it you have a home riddled in bullets.
2) You send in an armed robot. Said armed robot comes face to face with a guy with an AK-47, but the calm controller who is in not in harms way and not terrified for his own life wavers, assesses the situation, and sees that it is just some poor scared daddy standing in front of his kids worried that a Shiite militia has come to kill them all. Instead of turning daddy and family into a bloody mess, the marines can now assess the situation, tell him to drop the gun, keep his hands up, and in general keep the two twitchy fingered parties away from each other until everyone has calmed down enough to make rational decisions.
Drones are what are going to lead in dramatic drops in civilian casualties. Civilians die when scared soldiers either make poor snap judgments about a threat, or soldiers have to pick between returning fire into an area that might kill civilians or dying. Drones can help to eliminate these decisions. It is okay for a drone to die. Drones can be the first ones in so that soldiers can remotely assess the situation and have more then a split seconds to decide if they have stepped into a room full of bomb makers gearing up to blow away some civilians (intentionally), or if they have stumbled into a family with a couple of scared and armed brothers and fathers thinking that they are defending their family. Further, even when encountering resistance, drones can be sacrificed to save civilians. Telling an American teenager armed to the teeth and trained for war to not fire when someone is pointing an RPG his way under the cover of civilians is a damn hard thing to do. Most people are pretty unwilling to let themselves die. On the other hand, a drone can face down an RPG and die without firing a shot if that is what the rule of engagement call for.
I am not saying that drones are a magical cure all. Drones are still pathetic substitutes for human soldiers. What drones do bring to the table is a the ability to send a pair of armed eyes forward into situations where sending a few men forward might result in they or civilians being killed. If nothing else, they are a tool to assess the situation calmly, rather than while being pumped with adrenaline and being forced to make life and death decisions in split seconds.
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:3, Insightful)
"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it." -- Robert Edward Lee.
Re:bad tv references are posted by morons (Score:2, Insightful)
How many innocent civilians in Iraq have been turned into "pink mist?" Make no mistake, WE'RE the invading force there, and it's quite understandable and justifiable for them to hate us. Hussein was certainly no angel, but at least he was THEIR devil. We're foreign interlopers and will be treated as such.
-b.
Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd wager the bullet magnet role is not as impressive as what letting loose a dozen of these mounted with
They seem like they'd be more efficiently deployed as disposable sniper units than front line combat units.
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:2, Insightful)
If it gets blown up, whether by 'armed insurgents' or just some guy trying to defend his family, the next thing through the door WILL be the grenades followed by a lot of bullets. I really don't see civilian casualties dropping with these devices, and God help the grunts outside, cause they're gonna take fire as well. Do you REALLY expect the neighbors to sit there and 'just watch the light show'? Hell, no, they're going to figure they're next for a visit from the robot...
The 'unfortunate civilians' are still going to be killed, robots or no robots. And I don't know about you, but I have serious problems with just 'flattening a city' to end all insurgent resistance. Particularly in a 'war' that we shouldn't be fighting in the first place.
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice. I like how you've never been placed under restrictive rules of engagement, in which even if you see someone with a weapon you're not allowed to fire on them until they actually pointed it in your direction, but some how know EXACTLY what US military doctrine is. I really don't understand why these sorts of comments go unchallenged on Slashdot, when if you were to comment on any other complex, technical subject without knowing what the hell you were talking about, you'd be eaten alive by dozens of subject matter experts who have been working in that field for years.
Re:Police, not soldiers (Score:5, Insightful)
The army is plenty familiar with how to make a no-man's land, it's the press, and consiquentially the American People that will not allow those kind of tactics. This war is going the same way Vietnam went, because it has about the same support from the people that Vietnam had. War is terrible and ugly, the people don't want terrible and ugly, because they don't really believe in the cause. So the Army is asked to fight the Disney version of War. In DisneyWar only bad guys die, the oppressed welcome us as heroes, and all the soldiers come home in time for Christmas. The problem being of course DisneyWar doesn't really exist.
Armies are for killing the enemy, not for making new friends, not for keeping peace.
I agree that armies are not appropriate for 'peace-keeping'. When I was in the business, folks called it OOTW (Operations Other Than War) and dreaded it. There are no clear goals, no battle lines, and the rules change every day.
The problem with treating it like a typical occupation or 'total war,' is that you have to figure out who you are actually fighting. When we occupied Germany, things were simple: any German with a gun was resisting. When the French decided to weigh in on our Revolutionary war (what McCain wants to compare it to), similarly simple: only two sides (although things got interesting with guerillas and Torreys). You don't have that here.
If you follow McCain's logic that we are the French, who's side are we on? The insurgents (obviously not)? The Shia? The Sunni? The Kurds? Al Qaeda? The organized crime syndicates? Who do we shoot? We cannot simply declare everyone with a gun an enemy. Why not? Because every civilian in Bagdad has a legitimate need for a gun: to protect themselves from the other five sides, plus the corrupt police. We don't have the manpower to protect them 100% of the time or to disarm everyone at once. The average dad with an AK47 would be committing suicide and sacrificing his family to disarm. Men, women, and children are combatants. Children can and do deliver bombs (I have family that died that way). The only way that soldiers waging conventional war could stop the problem is to systematically shoot every man, woman, and child, block by block. Do you have the stomach for that?
So instead, we use soldiers, trained and armed to kill or be killed, in a situation for which they are manifestly unsuited. They are foreign invaders. They know little of the local language and culture. They have little or no police training. The Iraqi police and military liaisons who should be helping are unreliable. A significant fraction of the people they are trying to protect are hell bent on killing each other. Our soldiers use military tactics: fire support, artillery, etc., in populated areas. They don't bother identifying people before killing them (Wedding at Falujah, recent "friendly fire" helicopter attack on an Iraqi militia unit, etc.). They gun down families in their homes because a terrified father has a gun. They use 500 pound bombs or rockets to flush out individual insurgents in a row of block houses. And none of this is unusual: it's what soldiers are trained to do.
The thing is, there is no reason we should not have seen this going in (and many people did). Hussein's iron-fisted regime was the only thing holding the country together. Perhaps we would not have thought it would be this bad, but it should have been predicted and on the table. We had essentially four options: 1) accept the fact that we would have to brutally massacre most of the Iraqi civilians 2) Train and deploy a whole lot of Arabic speaking Military and perhaps civilian trained Police with the military as backup (and accept high casualties among Americans and Iraqis), 3) Fence the area in, let them go at it, and see who survives, 4) possibly combined with #2, reinstate the draft, arm and equip enough police and soldiers that we could realistically declare, enforce, and maintain total martial law, pre-cutting their food and giving them sp
Re:Great Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Why else do you think they have you waving flags and singing anthems?
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:1, Insightful)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-11346737
Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:3, Insightful)
Why are humans needed in the battlefield after all ? These robots can send pictures and sound, handle a gun, snipe with a machine gun, stay 7 days underwater and they can be repaired only for a fraction of the cost of a surgical operation. Right now they can do things humans can't. There are prototypes that can fly. I really don't see why humans would risk their life in the battlefield anymore.
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually thought that was the point - you can't answer moral questions by mindlessly referring to a simple set of rules. Whether it's three laws or ten commandments, list of rules can only be a guides or reminders, they can't be comprehensive.
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:2, Insightful)
So after the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Haditha massacre, and the many other war crimes committed by US soldiers, we should assume that all US soldiers are untrustworthy?
It's an odd thing, this assigning of collective responsibility. I see a lot of it, but I genuinely don't understand why everyone is so eager to engage in it.
Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:3, Insightful)
The investment in the soldier varies as does his/her functional and political value. Modern soldiers are highly valuable and highly combat-effective, but some of the systems they use are more valuable than an individual person (aircraft carriers, B-2 bombers) while others are less so.
Forces that can afford to expend people have some advantages. A suicide troop does not require support to escape after an attack, cannot be interrogated, cannot be held hostage (unlike valued live prisoners), and can be an instant hero/martyr/poster boy. If one has enough humans for "human wave" attacks they can overwhelm smaller higher-tech forces. If one is cynical enough, units one wishes to expend can be used as pawns (the VC during Tet) while the core (NVA) is preserved.
Re:Robot? That Ain't a Robot- THIS is a Robot. (Score:2, Insightful)
You make it sound like the disaster in Iraq is the People's fault. Blame the People, for not supporting the army enough. Blame the People for wanting their armed representatives abroad to be held to reasonable humanitarian standards. Blame the People for not thinking this is a cause worth levelling entire cities for.
Here's a thought. If the people don't really believe in the cause, why not blame the bosses? The regime that sent the army out there despite the wishes of the people? They're the ones at fault here.
Re:Great Ideas don't work in the military (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:3, Insightful)
It reasons that because bicycle helmets statistically do not affect the death rate in auto collisions, they don't provide any margin of safety. The reality is that bike helmets are not primarily intended to reduce fatalities. They are intended to reduce debilitating brain injuries from sub-fatal accidents.
It doesn't say anything about helmet wearing riders being more careless or taking more risks than non-helmet wearing riders, so it doesn't support your scenario.
The best example I can think of to support your position is the "Shock and Awe" campaign at the outset of the Iraq war. The idea was that precision munitions made aerial bombardment "clean" and somehow safe for civilians.
It's more interesting to look at the contrasts here. The idea behind the Shock and Awe campaign is that warfare could be made humane. The same may be true of the armed drones, however you can't argue that a this means somebody is more likely to pull the trigger when they have them in remote cross hairs than if they are there in person.
Remote-controlled devices are NOT robots. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:2, Insightful)
The primary objective of war is to convince your enemy that they do not want to fight you. When your in a situation where your options are A. Die, B. Live, you'll do alot to make sure option B is your selection. If war were pretty and rosy, it wouldn't be war. Bad things happen. the US is gearing up to lose a second war in half a decade not because we're not a superior fighting force, but because the media, and politicians would rather get the scoop and the coverage than the badguy. News flash, we don't give soldiers guns and grenades so that they can distribute hugs and candy. And they don't wear body armor because the badguys want to play Halo with us. Just an observation.
Not all that ironic or surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really all that surprising or ironic if you frame the situation properly. It's a lot harder for most humans who are used to pets to hate a pet as much as another human being. Pets are often seen as ultimately innocent, whereas other humans can be enemies. Also, it seems from your description that he had a personal bond with the dog and not with the kid who died. That also makes a difference in a lot of people's capacity for empathy, especially in a heightened "us vs. them" situation like a war. Such situation strengthens the bonding with those who are "us" and make it easier to hate and be callous to those who are "them." It's just human instinct -- our adaptations for competition as a pack animal.
Lastly, it's worth noting that Hitler loved dogs and was a vegetarian (the irritating kind that liked to tell fellow diners how sausages they were eating were made) because he hated animal cruelty, and yet he presided over the genocide of an entire people. Not to Godwin the discussion, but it is a stark "contradiction" in his personality that many have a hard time reconciling until you frame it in terms of "enemies" and "innocents."
Re:Asimov must be spinning in hgis grave... (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't take a long time to realize the MO for most Slashdotters is to make short, snide, sarcastic comments that feed the pluralistic view here that all things government, military, conservative, Microsoft, law enforcement, etc are quintessentially evil. I don't expect this to ever change.
Honestly, reading threads like this is the entire point of Slashdot and the reason I come here everyday - multiple times - to read what others have to say. Calling out a misinformed posting helps expose the truth and provides balance.
Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:3, Insightful)
It can be blowing 1000yds away, but deathly still where you are. The only way to judge is by movement in the grass/flags/trees. Then you also have to have target recognition - is that an enemy with a rocket launcher, or one carrying a pole with some water? I think human snipers will be better for a long time, however, I prefer my bullet magnets (front line) to be robots. I figure in about 50 years now, they'll realize "why fight for PHYSICAL land? Let's just do this C&C style baby! h4>0rs to the max!" Or something like that...
Re:The Mysterious Dr. Zecca (Score:3, Insightful)
A single robot could perform these two tasks; additional sensors could spot anyone approaching from behind or the sides, or from the air. The robot can reliably record all the data from the op, to confirm kills, etc. A robot could also be engineered to a form-factor (size and/or shape) that is more stealthy than a pair of humans, or more mobile for certain types of terrain (trees, cliffs, underwater; rivers/lakes). I know, the software is nowhere near this yet - but we're only scratching the surface of what is possible.
And the point of this is; it's only a matter of time before humans are replaced on the battlefield. As a measure of effectiveness of doing the job: killing the enemy, capturing territory and resources. What technology can't do effectively: provide security and civilized cohesiveness. We're seeing this in Iraq - already, where our strategy was to replace quantity of soldiers with technology.
The result? World's fastest, and least bloody invasion. Really, a miracle, compared to every other comparable invasion in human history. (except maybe Poland, Czeckoslovakia, and a few others where the invasion was more political than military). The invasion went well, the USA captured lots of territory in record time. But with insufficient troops to secure that territory, we have the absolute clusterfuck you see today. Planes can't solve it. Artillery can't solve it. Tanks can't solve it. Not if your goal is to protect civilians.
How could robots possibly solve this problem? Crank tens of thousands of them out of factories in Indonesia and China for $200 a piece (bill the US taxpayer $200,000 a piece) - then ship them to Iraq, then post them at every streetcorner in Iraq, to do what? Just sit there and shoot anything that moves? That wont work until we develop a sensor that can read a person's mind to determine if they're an insurgent, or an innocent civilian.
And you know what? The guy who stands to take a chunk of that $199,800 mark-up doesn't care. The innocent civilians who get shot, will be called "insurgents" on FoxNews. The manufacturer's stock price will shoot up. Americans will keep gassing up their H2, and drive alone to work, and they'll continue to not give a shit. Welcome to the future.