Robot Rebellion Quelled in Iraq 317
opencity writes "The Register reports that the (perhaps inevitable) robot rebellion has been avoided ... for now. 'Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.' Gizmodo also has a good photo."
Totally hilarious! (Score:2, Funny)
Simple Fix for bugs (Score:5, Interesting)
Tell the manager that the robot will be fully armed and that the manager will not get so much as a vest. I assure you the quality will improve quickly.
We do something like this at work (no, we don't shoot the programmers yet). When a new piece of software is released, the programmers have to field the support calls for 2 weeks. It's amazing how much quality improves when you have to deal with your own mistakes.
Re:Simple Fix for bugs (Score:4, Interesting)
I heard that the supervisors in charge of building submarines had to be on board the first time it submerged for the same reason... higher quality. When your own neck is on the line then the subtle mistakes seem to matter more.
Re:Simple Fix for bugs (Score:4, Interesting)
XCOR Aerospace does this. Anyone who works on a vehicle, or manages someone who does, gets a ride in the vehicle. It's actually important that it be everyone, not just the high level people -- or, if you can't do everyone for logistical reasons, a randomly chosen sample. Managers can motivate the people they manage, but only within limits. It's not fair to ask the manager to trust his group's work if the rest of the group won't do the same.
I'm told this was also done for Vietnam War helicopter maintenence -- after major servicing, the chief mechanic rode on the checkout flight.
Re:Simple Fix for bugs (Score:4, Insightful)
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Surplus availability? (Score:5, Funny)
So how long before these are available at Army Surplus? I have some cute ideas for mods.
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So how long before these are available at Army Surplus? I have some cute ideas for mods.
To be honest, this is a robot with a Fricking Awesome Machine gun, much MUCH cooler than sharks with lasers on their heads, what mods would u possibly need to add!
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Camouflage for urban areas?
Don't mind me, just thinking out loud...
Re:Surplus availability? (Score:5, Funny)
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Check Iraqi Ebay, they have all sorts of cool military "surplus" for sale.
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Photo hosted at Gizmodo, eh.
Maybe they were in Iraq with a clicker for continued laughs. There are some dicks at Gizmodo. [news.com]
(btw this new javascript enhanced slashdot sucks sweaty moose balls.)
Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:5, Insightful)
> robotics would be incapable of firing
> the weapon ever.
And that's how it should be!
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1. I can sit in a tank turret, aim the Coax machinegun using the turret elctro-mechanical systems to point it at a target that I'm observing through an electronic imaging system and fire it and it's OK,
2. Connect the systems to a remote unit via an RF link rather than a hardwire and suddenly it's a "robot" and scary,
What the difference? This "robot" turned guns on it's fleshy comrades, operator error is much more likely; the guided missiles we've been shooting for half a century are closer to
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Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. War always requires some sort of damage beyond soldiers and military equipment or it never ends. One of the host socienties must feel enough pain to give up the fight.
2. We have put extraordinary effort into not harming civilan populations, we have done a good job in the historical sense of finging wars but lots of innocent people have still been hurt. Lots of non-militarilay valuable property has been destroyed.
3. Acording to the article summary we have already demonstraited an inability to produce robots that can correctly identify targets and non-targets.
There are some who look at Iraq and Vietnam and wonder if our instance on 2 is at least partly to blame for our (I wont say failures, if we are beening intelectually host its not fair), less then total success. So a war fought entirely by proxy with robots(If they worked) might be a very long one. I would image it would only end when it was economicly or enviornmentally (those are really not separte) possible to keep building robots. That would be in many ways worse for the human populations then if we just died on the battle field. Finally we don't know for sure the robots wont work properly but I am not optimistic given fact number three. Hell we are talking about governments here both US and European alike that can't manage to execute their own elections acording to their own rules; electronicly or otherwise.
Why do think we could build a robot army again?
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the post ought to read:
It is a safe bet that someone would get hurt; probably lots of someones. Regardless of your feelings about the war in Iraq some things are true:
1. War always requires some sort of damage beyond soldiers and military equipment or it never ends. One of the host societies must feel enough pain to give up the fight.
2. We hav
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Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, in all warfare the enemy is first made to look inhuman. Not only soldiers, but whole nations are bombarded with propaganda (i.e. brainwashed) about the horrible enemy and the necessity to protect their homes, families and way of life.
America is nowadays bombarded with anti-terrorist propaganda in much the same manner, and the way you treat your prisoners of war^W^W^Wcaptured enemy combatants suggests that you don't think of them as human either.
Therefore, in order to weasel out of these laws, robots would merely have to do the very same thing humans do.
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Besides that, it's silly to assume that the only possible use for robots is to kill the enemy. There's also protecting your troops, perhaps by clearing minefields, performing recon, destroying infrastructure, extricating the wounded from the battlefield, and any number of other hazardous duties.
Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:5, Informative)
I, Robot (absolutely NOTHING like the movie)
Caves of Steel
The Naked Sun
Robots of Dawn
Robots and Empire
Asimov is smarter than you give him credit for.
Re:Somehow reminds me of Asimov... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention his book on Physics (real physics, very easy to follow) and his review of the Bible (a historic view of the old and new testament) among others.
I really enjoyed a book of him that I found in used books store. I do not remember now the name of the book now but it was something like "Asimov on Mathematics" and it contained a bunch of articles written by him discussing several mathematics issues such as large numbers, small numbers, the decimals in PI, etc. Really good stuff.
Oh, and I think it was in that same book that he have some comments about Star Wars films. I think it was quite neat to read him commenting about it.
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Asimov wrote more about theology than you probably have ever read. With all due respect, he could have nailed your hide to the wall in a theological discussion...
rj
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Any 'machine intelligence' designed to kill will have just enough autonomy to complete whatever mission it is assigned to do. Any thought to three laws in a machine killer would just be an impediment to the machine completing the assigned task, any morality or semblance of human intelligence would be about as likely as you being able to have a conversation with an ant.
A machine killer will be a t
I for one (Score:5, Funny)
On second thought.
I thought, everything that could go wrong in Iraq (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I thought, everything that could go wrong in Ir (Score:3, Funny)
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a) When lancet says 5-600,000 that they mean 500,000 to 600,000, when in fact it means 5.0 - 600,000. (ok a little tongue in cheek, but the lancet study was quite flawed, and significantly overestimated the number of deaths compared to every other study conducted.)
b) That coalition troops are the ones killing the civilians. This is important. While there are certainly collateral deaths due to american troops engaging resistance or perceived resistance, the majority ca
Re:I thought, everything that could go wrong in Ir (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I thought, everything that could go wrong in Ir (Score:5, Insightful)
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And i tend to disagree with people that say 1000 is a bloodbath. More people die in a month from car accidents then we have lost in the ENTIRE operation. Anyone remember WWII? 1000 is a drop in the bucket.
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Re:I thought, everything that could go wrong in Ir (Score:5, Informative)
This is the first war that has had a careful statistical study of civilian deaths. Since the entire world knew this war was going to happen well in advance, the WHO sent researchers to perform what's called cluster analysis- they identified 10,000 households and then visited them repeatedly over the next three years to determine actual mortality. They then extrapolated to the population of the country as a whole.
Result: 151,000 excess violent deaths (95% CI, 104000-233000).
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According to the paper's abstract [nejm.org] there were several areas where they were not able to survey because of security concerns, and so they took figures from Iraq Body Count, which is very far from what I'd consider a scientific source. On top of that, they figure that the areas they couldn't survey themselves
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April 1? (Score:2)
How recent? 11 days ago?
Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Or Viagra (Score:2, Funny)
and then had to stop some of the visions popping up from the depths of my obviously depraved mind...
Re:Or Viagra (Score:4, Funny)
But INSANE WarBots running around with loaded machine guns AND Viagra powered erections just makes me want to crawl into a dark closet with my blankie....
Re:Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Vista (Score:5, Funny)
Robo cop? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sometimes it seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same...
not the first time a "robot" cannon has gone wild. (Score:4, Informative)
One of the problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not so bad when we are talking about automated warehouse trucks and similar robots, but when they are armed and constructed to kill it becomes something very serious indeed.
So you'll need a kill-switch, but not one that the enemy can use, so it needs to be complicated, but not too complicated because then it won't work when needed. Not an easy thing to do.
Oh, and there will be bugs in the machine. I have yet to write a single script or program that didn't have a bug in it. And I don't think I'm unique in this aspect. Now, do we really want to let loose a machine designed for killing that we don't have an easy way to shut off and that we know will have bugs in it?
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There is nothing new about having lives depend on software.
Air traffic control, medical devices, nuclear power stations, space travel ... bugs in software in any of these can very quickly cost lives.
My point being, it's not impossible to achieve an acceptable level of safety in these cases. (Although it's expensive). So it's not necessarily impossible here.
One obvious feature ... which I would hope is in there ... is a physical rather than software safety catch on the weapon. Have it be possible to di
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I bet that somebody just like you, said something very similar at the initial project meetings for the ED-209, and then was promptly escorted out of the building after clearing out his desk.
But that's OKAY cuz the guy who got nailed in the presentation was an asshole you did not like anyways who could not code himself out of a box.
Let's remember the most IMPORTANT directive is not being able to fire on the officers. Enlisted men, well......
Re:One of the problems. (Score:5, Funny)
It's easy:
Re:One of the problems. (Score:5, Informative)
I operated one of these systems on top of my truck in Iraq. It was possibly the biggest waste of effort ever. When we went over even slightly rough terrain it would shake itself apart so badly that i had to tighten its bolts of several times a day. If i could find the appropriate sized allen wrench that is. Even then it would stop moving without any apparent reason. Like it was stuck or something.
The view it offered was vastly inferior to just being in the turret myself. I couldn't see anything that wasn't straight in front of it. Ultimately we gave it back to the armory, told them it was broken and we didn't want it back. In other words, that machine is shit. I'd rather stick halfway out the top of of an armored truck than use it again.
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Sure, in the meantime you're not getting any benefits of the unit and you'd need to make sure you had enough real troops to do the job, but at least you get a good feel for what the machine is capable of.
Granted, there will be those who raise the issue of how much testing is enough. I think that you need to look
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And then, All Hell broke loose... (Score:2)
See what happens when you remove the talon's phallic inhibitor that restricts the Centurions', um robots', higher functions.
[Note to self: don't piss off 6.]
where is the obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
Upgrade the software! (Score:2)
Yeah... (Score:2)
To recoup R&D costs.. (Score:5, Funny)
my question (Score:2)
I mean, it would allow you to hit people that are defended by sniper fire and the like, without worrying about getting hit.
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Um, exactly because of problems like this?
Makes no sense to me (Score:2)
Saw these on 'Future Weapons' (Score:2, Interesting)
With the uptake of the new season of Dr. Who, (Score:2)
I'm glad the military acted so fast (Score:2)
Now if only they could do something about *Iraqi* rebellion, we'd be in business.
The robots have been in Iraq for months... (Score:2)
Time to look somewhere else.
Thoughts on Robot Warriors (Score:3, Insightful)
On the one hand, I it is a Good Thing that robots can be used to fight instead of people, because, if a robot warrior gets destroyed, I won't feel nearly as bad as when a human soldier gets killed.
On the other hand, incurring human casualties and bad feelings when going to war is a Good Thing. The idea that one can go to war by sending the robots and not incur any negativity on the home fronts is really scary. Going to war _should_ be painful.
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That only works as a deterrent if the pain is felt by the people calling for the war.
If people don't like wars they should consider my proposal:
If leaders wish to send troops to battle for _offensive_ (not defense) purposes (or risk lives of a substantial number of civilians), they have to put their own lives at risk as well. Defensive wars are different of course.
This could be done in the following manner:
A referendum is held. If there are insufficient votes (for example:
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The first dictator, king, sultan or overlord who feels it is in the country's best interest to invade their neighbor would bring your world to an end.
It should be noted that the reason the US didn't enter WWI until 1917 and WWII until 1941 was because of very strong opposition by the population at large. It was only after we were attacked that we got involved. This, even though we were part of the Atlantic Charter, a treaty between what
Why 10 years again? (Score:2, Interesting)
$230K per robot (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, even a good thick black net might be enough to disable the sensors on this thing. Or maybe use a large electromagnet attached to a pickup truck with a long enough cable?
OTOH, $230K is the cost to the army. It's probably worth less as stolen goods. If I know the Army, it's probably worth a lot less.
seemed like a good idea at the time (Score:4, Funny)
the problem (Score:2)
*all* remote systems can be hacked, and regardless of our arrogance in our intelligence there are enough smart people who can break in to any system we build.
If these things *ever* become mainstream, an "enemy's" first job would be to hack into them. It is the least risky mode of attack.
seen these on TV (Score:2)
Aren't we talking about just one robot? (Score:2)
Somebody should give Ratchet a call and ask him to send over a couple of those little remote-controlled spiders he has in his inventory. They're a lot cuter than these lunks and seem to work quite well for him.
Armed robots aside... (Score:5, Interesting)
Am I the only one having trouble that an invading force, armed with the most high-tech toys (in experimental phase) is just using these low-tech rebellians as cannon meat? Using remote controlled guns "to avoid friendly casualties" (the invading force) sounds wrong if the kill ratio is so much out of proportion (the "they are killing us" argument doesn't add up for an invading force).
I just know, that if there'd be an invading force, no matter how technical advanced, killing a rediculious amount of people, I'd aim for them and fight with my life too. No matter how misguided my beliefs could be or of those murdered.
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Kill ratio doesn't mean much of anything. See, eg. a ground war between the US and China. Would you be oh-so-happy about being overrun and wiped out by a horde of Chinese soldiers, because, after all, the kill ratio is much higher on the US side?
The kill ratio in Iraq is, in no small part, because US soldiers DON'T have a kill-bot that they can send in to just take ou
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But this particular concept began to be written about in those terms around the late 1800s, mostly around the colonial wars in Africa, China, and the Crimea.
In fact the war on the Zulu nation comes particularly to mind.
Its all about selling weapons to large Government powers.
Just wait until they turn the US Army loose on its own population. Thats one scenario, another is that the US continues to frag other, political
call-me-kenneth speaks... (Score:2)
History, it seems, is not without a sense of irony (Score:2)
Back in the 80s, when Star Wars was all the rage, the US military was caricatured as read too much science fiction. Now their killer robot has turned against its masters and they are acting surprised, it looks like they are reading too little science fiction.
When will they get the balance right?
Re:History, it seems, is not without a sense of ir (Score:2)
rj
They never learn... (Score:2, Informative)
These should be illegal (Score:2, Insightful)
It sounds great the idea of saving soldiers lives. But think about when our enemies have armed drones? When they have cheap, easy-to-build, lethal drones that a couple of rebels in the mountains can build with old computer
Robots are so stupid (Score:3, Funny)
Stupid article. Real problem. (Score:3, Informative)
Stupid article. Real problem.
The SWORDS robot isn't autonomous; it has the autonomy level of an R/C car.
Something like this happened in the 1980s with the Sgt. York Air Division Air Defense Gun, which was an automated antiaircraft weapon. During a demo, it pointed its guns at the reviewing stand. The project was canceled. (Arguably, it was canceled for other reasons. The DIVAD was built as a response to the USSR's ZSU, their radar-directed anti-aircraft gun. This class of weapon is useful if you're being attacked by a squadron of helicopters, but it can't hit fast-movers like fighter-bombers. Only the US attacks with large numbers of helicopters, because you have to have both a big budget and air superiority to do that. So it wasn't something the U.S. Army needed to defend against. A few guys with Stingers could stop any small scale helicopter assaults.)
The point, though, is that the U.S. military has a very low tolerance for this class of mistake, and sizable projects have been canceled for it. This was the very first deployment of an armed ground combat robot to a war zone. Three units went to Iraq. The cancellation of the project is a sizable blow to the future of armed combat robots.
Replacing a little gun with a bigger one (Score:5, Insightful)
So after reading the article and associated links, I gather that:
1. The U.S. Army commissioned Foster-Miller to modify their TALON remote-controlled vehicle to carry and operate various types of weapons. The modified vehicle is named SWORDS, and erroneously described as a "robot", although it is neither human-like in appearance nor autonomous in operation.
2. Some time later, the Army canceled the production order, citing an "unexpected movement" of a single test unit.
3. Simultaneously, the Army purchased, from the same company, a bigger, badder version of the same product [foster-miller.com].
Folks, this isn't a failed robotic uprising [theregister.co.uk]. It isn't even the over-reaction of a safety-conscious Army Executive [popularmechanics.com]. This is an excuse to kill a little project in order to start a bigger one.
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The formal definition of robot does not mention "human-like" or "autonomous" as a requirement:
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) a robot is a machine which can be programmed to perform tasks which involve manipulative and in some cases locomotive actions under automatic control.
The Swedish Industrial Robotics Association defines a robot as an automatically controlled,