Killer Military Robot Arms Race Underway?

coondoggie writes to tell us NetworkWorld is reporting that one researcher seems to think that a military robot arms race may be imminent between both governments and terrorists. "We are beginning to see the first steps towards an international robot arms race and it may not be long before robots become a standard terrorist weapon to replace the suicide bomber, according to professor Noel Sharkey, from the Royal United Services Institute Department of Computer Science. [...] Currently there is always a human in the loop to decide on the use of lethal force. However, this is set to change with the US giving priority to autonomous weapons - robots that will decide on where, when and who to kill, according to the professor."

And yet, for all the warnings

[WindBourne]

this will continue. The advantage that countries have over terrorist is the ability to build these faster, and more, while the terrorist will have the advantage of needing just a few to hit a relatively none moving enemy. Of course, the real issue will be what happens when 2 major nations move from a cold war to a hot war. Will they use the robots and lasers? I suspect that the next "great" war will be fought in just that context.

Now, ir we can turn these robots into good civil use, then it will help. In particular, if we really want to settle on Mars and perhaps the moon, we will need robots. They will enable us to do the building in a fraction of the time and most likely at a fraction of the costs.

Cats and newspapers

[Harmonious Botch]

Until someone can build an automatic vacuum cleaner that does not try to eat my cat, or an automated lawnmower that does not trim the newspaper, I'm not going to worry.
Even if the tech does reach that level, building a military bot is another level beyond that. And somehow, I think that it is not going to be well understood by guys whose concept of hi-tech is a retractable box knife.
It's gonna be a longgg time before I worry.

3-2-1 ACTIVATE

[Mushdot]

I think this is a natural progression for nations with an organised military. Once the basics are down machines can be churned out much quicker than we can train humans and you don't need to be as accurate and quick thinking as a human would be - sheer numbers and a shotgun approach would suffice and so who has the greatest manufacturing capacity would have the advantage.

Looking further into the future I'm sure wars will be fought totally on a technological basis e.g. hacking networks to shut down utilities and enemy soldiers to disable them etc. Maybe even further along wars will be won and lost without loss of human life - "Ok we surrender, we have no food, water or power and our Unisols are pointing their guns at us. You can have our continent."

I may have the wrong sci-fi series but I'm sure I remember a Star Trek episode where wars were fought by computer and afterward the required number of human casualties were euthanised to balance the books? Maybe at that point the geek shall inherit the earth and FPS skills will finally be recognised for what they are :-)

Re:Meanwhile, in Baghdad

[stoolpigeon]

From what I've read - and I'm no expert - they recruit heavily from many parts of the world, and I think it has been pretty well documented, that they have also used unwilling participants by either lying to them or taking advantage of people with limited mental capacity. I've seen television footage on youtube and such that seems to indicate that in places like Palestine they are doing their best to indoctrinate children in a manner that will make them more likely to be candidates when they get older.
 
I would think that automated weaponry can only help counter-terrorism forces, unless there is some kind of huge mishap or malfunction. The terrorists depend on fighting the will of their opponent. Would so many in the US be so hot to leave Iraq if there were not so many American casualties? I personally doubt it.
 
On a side note - I'm not interested in debating foreign policy or the situation in the middle east as far as who's at fault, right/wrong, etc. Just commenting on what I know of current conditions.

I-41

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

That should be the name for this. Model I-41.

That, or the obvious "WarCrimes Master 2020".

Or how about just "KillJoy-3000" [wired.com]

Always a human in the loop

[trybywrench]

There will always be a human in the loop as far as semi-autonomous weapons go. I'm surprised anyone on slashdot would think otherwise. Maybe 50 years from now an AI would have the intelligence to separate friend from foe from bystander but the tech is simply not there now.

I imagine what we'll see is weapons deployed around the world with their controllers located somewhere else safe. That means easier/faster deployment and none of your own soldiers in harm's way. Maybe UAV's push proposed targets to commanders instead of commanders pouring over recon :shrug: i can see that but not a pure autonomous firefight. For a long time a human will be giving the final OK to fire.

Re:Meanwhile, in Baghdad

[Irvu]

Somewhat snarky (or sick) as this sounds I think you are right. The one true advantage that a suicide bomber confers is actually not the cheapness but the use of a human at all. As much as we may tend to hear them described as terrorists, etc. the simple fact of the matter is that most sucide bombers are anything but true believers but the misled, the misguided or the depressed.

But however much their personal reasons vary the fact that they are willing to blow themselves up sends a clear, and direct message. When the lives of a people are so bad that they can be found willing to kill themselves then what does that say? Put another way, when the people a government "serves" are so willing to die then no illusion of happiness can be maintained. And people, unlike robots can go where people go, cafes resteraunts, etc. They can look like anyone, be like anyone thus engendering the paranoia that destroys a civilization.

Look at Israel. The goal of suicide bombers there has been to make people afraid to go out, afraid to shop, afraid to sit in a cafe. Afraid, period to trust that the person next to them won't explode in a shower of nails at any moment. Not being an israeli I can't say how pervasive the fear is but my impression is that it is nonegligeable. Similar things could easily be said of Iraq where the prospect is that the neighbor might kill you for being a member of the wrong tribe or sect.

Until a robot offers gains at a comparatively cheap price they won't be chosen by "terrorists". Wealthier governments may prefer them but to what end? The laws of war (yes they exist) and the logic of war assumes human decisionmaking, an automatic robot seems more like a landmine, something that would kill "impersonally" and, like landmines seems likely to be one of those things that may do as much harm to the ones who deploy it as their "enemies" (let alone civilians) and will last long after the conflict in which it 'served'.

This American Life, is a PRI radio show that you can listen to online. They ran a good piece called "Know Your Enemy" [thisamericanlife.org] that featured a meeting between a would-be suicide bomber and the Israeli minister of defense. The interview is enlightening both for the characteristics of the bomber and the process by which such suicide bombers are produced.

Re:The future

[Wylfing]

Pah! You forgot "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick. Now that is a story about exactly what is under discussion: an escalating robot arms race that turns out quite poorly for everyone.

Re:Obligatory

[Cedric Tsui]

The laws in that order confuse me.

Because some kid could walk up to a robot, and tell it to waltz off a cliff and it would do so. (in such a way as to not kill any people on the way down) I believe the second and third laws would need to be switched.

Re:I develop these systems, this story is 4 pagevi

[Big_Breaker]

There are truely automonous weapons out there already: land mines

Secondarily there are cluster munitions that do automatic target selection within the drop zone. They are perhaps part of a more broad catagory of autonomous target selecting munitions such as homing turpedos and missiles.

Re:Meanwhile, in Baghdad

[mobby_6kl]

>won't they eventually start running low on personnel?

Sure, but then they'll just start strapping the explosives to random retarded/crazy people [nytimes.com]. If one RTFA, it appears that the women didn't actually have Down syndrome as originally claimed, but were possibly schizophrenic instead. Convincing these folks should be quite a bit easier than selling the 72 virgins story.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Meanwhile, in Baghdad

[CannonballHead]

Insightful? I'm not sure the Islam-believing terrorists are fighting just to get "us" out of their land. It's a war on infidels, in their lingo, isn't it? An infidel is not one who is in their land "torturing, killing, and oppressing their family members." According to the omniscient Wikipedia: "An infidel (literally, "one without faith") is one who doubts or rejects central tenets of a religion, especially those regarding its deities"

The lie that terrorists exist because the United States is torturing, killing, and oppressing all over the world is just that: a lie. If you're going to be critical about the US, or any country for that matter, at least do it with an understanding of both sides; maybe start with finding out what exactly the terrorists are really fighting.

Re:Meanwhile, in Baghdad

[blahplusplus]

"the USA has been demonized by terrorist groups,"

But the good ol USA is a terrorist state. Exporting terror to the world via illegal wars, coups and economic warfare. Let's not mince words here, if your country was illegally invaded getting attacked and your family members were killed I would hardly call you a "terrorist" for hating the country that will not stop illegally meddling in you affairs.

The fact that the USA loves to criminally meddle in other states affairs is quite enough proof that US is a terrorist state.

Re:Meanwhile, in Baghdad

[krou]

I'm not entirely sure that's correct at all. There's been fairly good research into this. For example, see Robert Pape's "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism" (interview here [amconmag.com]):

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign--over 95 percent of all the incidents--has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.

...

If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people--three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia--with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran.

Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan.

I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990.

Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.

That's not to say that some very vocal minority groups may be saying what you describe, but the reality seem to be very different for the majority.

Stanislaw Lem to The Rescue

[Anonymous Coward]

I will only refer to Stanislaw Lem's 1987 novel Peace on Earth as to how this will play out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel) [wikipedia.org]