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@h Killer robots was a hot topic when I started blogging over a decade ago. The justification back then was that robots would make better kill decisions unclouded by emotion, echoing the rhetoric of "surgical strikes" from earlier times, that they meant fewer humans put in harm's way, fewer allied PTSD casualties and large scale swarm formations who would have no problems following perfect choreography (give or take jamming methods and sensor error).
But most of the roboticists who had any brain cells remaining knew that autonomous kill decisions wouldn't result in warfare becoming "a mere spectacle of machines" as Tesla had predicted a century before. One of the CMU roboticists gave what I think was a convincing speech about "the ethics of roboticists" and their responsibility towards the world at large beyond the narrow engineering considerations.
I've been out of the loop on this stuff for quite a while and so I havn't been following the latest developments. My expectation is that things went badly and the most despicable people were put in charge, because ultimately this is a game of power politics and Capital has a way of creating social configurations which result in engineers working against their own interests.
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@bob @h Modern torpedoes are basically killer robots. From what I understand, submarines don't like to "fire" torpedoes since it gives their position away. Instead, they quietly drop off an autonomous torpedo somewhere then slink away. A while later the torpedo starts off and does its thing on its own. Back in the 1990s, talking to an engineer, I heard that sophisticated ones have a sort of database of sensor signatures of what's a target and what's not, and if they miss the target they can come back and have another go. Parodied by the Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell https://quitter.no/attachment/1520116 https://quitter.no/attachment/1520117
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@hattiecat @h V1 doodlebugs from WW2 were at the time described as "robot weapons" in British newspapers. But those aren't the type of killer robots which were being discussed in the 2000s. There was a debate around ground based armed and autonomous robots, able to make their own targeting decisions and operate collectively in formations. Basically small tanks with a big gun strapped on, various sensors and a control computer.
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@bob @h About 5 year ago I talked with researchers at a US organization who were talking about self-organizing intelligent drone swarms, distributed sensors and tactics. Robot wars: politically attractive in that it doesn't attract negative publicity associated with deaths of servicemen, and if it's remote you can always deny causing any casualties, as is happening in Syria. (Anyone on the ground who says otherwise is a propagandist...)
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@hattiecat @h The autonomous element muddies the waters. So if a general gives a high level command to "clear the village" and some atrocity occurs it's not altogether clear where the responsibility is. The manufacturer of the robot? A sensor glitch? The programmers who wrote the source code? The researchers who made the AI algorithms? And so on.
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@bob @hattiecat @h Any guided missile is in Swedish called a robot. When I was in the Navy, the patrol boats used the heat-seeking "Robot 12"[0] and the corvettes used and still use the radar-guided "Robot 15"[1]. The Army uses the luggable "Robotsystem 70"[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_(missile)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBS-15
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBS_70
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@hattiecat @bob @h A missile defense missile is an "antirobotrobot".
Bob Mottram
Hattie Cat
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