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Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

bbc.com

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Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#41

Post by AYBABTME »

If you're being attacked, troops on the ground aren't necessarily better than autonomous robots. Robots don't rape and pillage. An advancing robotic army doesn't incentivize the retreating force in adopting a scorched earth tactic, since the robots don't need buildings to house them, groceries or farms.

Maybe I read too much about the Nanking massacre recently, but having it fresh in my mind makes me question whether the often repeated assumption that humans need to be involved, is to be taken at face value. Maybe it's a good idea to keep humans at a safe distance, even if they're actively part of the conflict.

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#42

Post by hoseja »

michaelt wrote: post #20
dilippkumar wrote: post #2

I don't buy this. Given a sufficiently desperate situation, I can't imagine any military with autonomous tanks taking a call to keep the autonomous shooting "disabled" when it would risk actually loosing a war. If anyone had real ethical concerns, they would've not put a gun on a robot to begin with. Once you arm a robot, a software disable is just lipstick on a pig.

I've heard it argued that cruise missiles are robots - at least as much as a Roomba is - and hence that 'killer robots' have been with us for decades.

Of course, the only problem people have with this boils down to watching too many action movies starring eventual governors of California.

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#43

Post by C1sc0cat »

chrismmay wrote: post #5

That demo where the unmanned tank pointed its gun at the platform full of generals...... talk about your nightmare demo. I’ve done a few and even getting my network connection working at a client site can make me sweat a little when a room full of executives are waiting. I can’t imagine how the engineers felt when their baby went off the reservation like that.

There is the famous ww2 rocket powered mine that looked like a pair of giant Catharine wheels that was designed to breach defences on d day.

When tested it ran amuck and turned back towards the observers

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#44

Post by eeZah7Ux »

tjchear wrote: post #4

On one hand, I'm pretty excited that something from the universe of Ghost in the Shell would become reality; on the other hand, it's a slippery slope to some dystopian reality where ethical considerations are completely removed from battle.

> I'm pretty excited that something from the universe of Ghost in the Shell would become reality

Pretty excited?

Cyberpunk was always intended as a dire warning of the looming dystopian future.

And urge people to rebel to it. It literally has "punk" in its name.

It's a bit sad to see how it's been flipped on its head.

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#45

Post by vidarh »

tjchear wrote: post #26
remarkEon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Repeat of WWI, to be honest, with all these technologies clashing together for the first time. There weren't a lot of "ethical considerations" to using chemical weapons when the alternative was losing thousands in another doomed charge out of the trenches. Same with WWII, where the US would rather open Pandora's box of the Nuclear Age than risk a ground invasion of mainland Japan.

I'll grant you that there weren't much ethical considerations to speak of in the last world wars, and perhaps my naive view has been unrealistically colored by sci-fi TV shows, but my point is simple: a broken autonomous killing system won't know when to stop. Even unethical war makers have affinity to humankind and know when to stop. And despite the meaning implied by the MAD doctrine, it never meant that humans wil…

Unintended consequences certainly gets more and more dangerous the more advanced autonomy these weapons gets. In keeping with your mention of sci-fi, there's a Star Trek Voyager episode where two sides of killer robots continue to wage war against each other after having killed their makers because their makers had agreed on a truce, and their instructions had been to eliminate anyone that prevented them from beating their enemy and hence by agreeing a truce their makers had become an obstacle to achieving their programmed goal.

Having done software development my entire life, I'd never trust anyone to manage to avoid every pitfall in guaranteeing you have a foolproof way of making them stop...

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#47

Post by eeZah7Ux »

krageon wrote: post #40
trimboffle wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I put it to you that dropping multiple nukes was not about avoiding ground war in japan. The US simply wanted to drop the nukes and see the outcome and win the war through pure unadulterated terror and fear.

Japan was an extremely bad actor. They had death camps just like the Germans did at that time. One can imagine that the German victims wished someone dropped a few nukes so Germany would back off a bit quicker. In the end it wasn't exactly pretty, but saying it was just for terror and fear seems like it takes a complicated situation and makes it one-dimensional. We've all been alive long enough to know real life is g…

Please don't.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki hosted mostly old retired people and children, and women in a smaller percentage. It hosted no military equipment of any significance, nor strategic locations, nor any significant factory.

A large number of people were [ex] fishermen and quite poor.

These people had very little power or ability to either support or resist the militaristic elite. They were well in the bottom 20% of literacy, wealth, fitness for war, political influence and specialized skills. Therefore they were mostly innocent.

They were wiped away as a show of force and aggressiveness to intimidate other countries including USSR.

> They had death camps just like the Germans did at that time

The Nazi did it, not "the Germans".

And it still does not justify targeting a large number of retirees and children that are contributing nothing to the war effort.

> takes a complicated situation and makes it one-dimensional

...

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#48

Post by SandunGunn »

AYBABTME wrote: post #41

If you're being attacked, troops on the ground aren't necessarily better than autonomous robots. Robots don't rape and pillage. An advancing robotic army doesn't incentivize the retreating force in adopting a scorched earth tactic, since the robots don't need buildings to house them, groceries or farms. Maybe I read too much about the Nanking massacre recently, but having it fresh in my mind makes me question whether…

But we should have 'skin in the game'. Removing the risk, by using robots, lowers the barriers to engage in conflicts and may lead us to behave more aggressively than we would have done otherwise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_94xdbisu8

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#49

Post by krageon »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #47
krageon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan was an extremely bad actor. They had death camps just like the Germans did at that time. One can imagine that the German victims wished someone dropped a few nukes so Germany would back off a bit quicker. In the end it wasn't exactly pretty, but saying it was just for terror and fear seems like it takes a complicated situation and makes it one-dimensional. We've all been alive long enough to know real life is g…

Please don't. Hiroshima and Nagasaki hosted mostly old retired people and children, and women in a smaller percentage. It hosted no military equipment of any significance, nor strategic locations, nor any significant factory. A large number of people were [ex] fishermen and quite poor. These people had very little power or ability to either support or resist the militaristic elite. They were well in the bottom 20% of…

> Please don't.

Please don't what? I was offering a different view to the same issues, along with a plea to view complicated situations in the same way that the people subject to them at the time did: As complicated situations. Reducing it to this one-dimensional "everyone was innocent" reasoning is demeaning to the people making those hard decisions. They have to sleep too, and that's hard enough when the situations in question are viewed as they are, let alone when they are oversimplified by people who were only alive after the fact.

> It hosted no military equipment of any significance

Given that there were a number of "work camps" within spitting distance of those targets, it seems a little disingenuous to claim that there wasn't anything there. And even if that was the case, someone pulled the trigger in the way they did - it behooves us to think about the why of that decision in manner that doesn't reduce them to imperialist caricatures of what they were. That way, we'll never really understand why their decisions were made in the way they were. If we don't understand them, it will be harder to choose to avoid their reasoning ourselves.

Even if we eventually arrive at the conclusion that this was entirely the wrong decision, we owe it to every victim (both the people dying and the people doing the killing) to understand the situation properly so what they went through teaches us the right things.

Re: Robot tanks: On patrol but not allowed to shoot

#50

Post by zurn »

6nf wrote: post #10
throwawaycanada wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guarantee they can be programmed to carry out missions without sending and receiving signals. Otherwise they can always be detected.

I don’t think you can realistically detect predator - satellite comms

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/intercepting_...
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