Human Rights Watch: Petition Against Robots On the Battle Field 275
New submitter KublaCant writes "'At this very moment, researchers around the world – including in the United States – are working to develop fully autonomous war machines: killer robots. This is not science fiction. It is a real and powerful threat to humanity.' These are the first words of a Human Rights Watch Petition to President Obama to keep robots from the battlefield. The argument is that robots possess neither common sense, 'real' reason, any sense of mercy nor — most important — the option to not obey illegal commands. With the fast-spreading use of drones et al., we are allegedly a long way off from Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics being implanted in autonomous fighting machines, or into any ( semi- ) autonomous robot.
A 'Stop the Killer Robots' campaign will also be launched in April at the British House of Commons and includes many of the groups that successfully campaigned to have international action taken against cluster bombs and landmines. They hope to get a similar global treaty against autonomous weapons. The Guardian has more about this, including quotes from well-known robotics researcher Noel Sharkey from Sheffield University."
These are not the droids you're looking for (Score:5, Informative)
Hey, James Cameron, are you the submitter??
The automomous Terminator-style robots the summary refers to are far from becoming a battlefield standard, much to the disappointment of the /. crowd and sci-fi nerds.
Predator drones et al., like all current robotic devices in the battlefield, still have a human being in charge making all the decisions, so the points raised are completely moot.
Re:Recommended Reading (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Total Garbage. (Score:3, Informative)
A huge amount is known about the X-37 [wikipedia.org] seeing as it's a redirected NASA project. It's capable of autonomous landing and it's widely assumed that it performed its primary reconaissance mission autonomously seeing as it's basically a glorified spy satellite capable of a controlled re-entry.
We already have fully autonomous combat aircraft, that can be pointed at a target and perform complex manouvers in order to reach and subsequently destroy it. They're called cruise missiles. You're hopelessly naive if you think we're more than a decade from a drone that can cruise to a target and wait for the operator to give the fire order.
Re:I want that! (Score:4, Informative)
His machines weren't "robots" any more than Predator drones are: they were remote controlled by radio.
Yes. That is probably why he stated that they were remote-controlled.