Robot Weapons

Detective Del Spooner: What if I'm right?

Lt. John Bergin: [sighs] Well, then I guess we're gonna miss the good old days.

Detective Del Spooner: What good old days?

Lt. John Bergin: When people were killed by other people.

—Memorable scene from I, Robot (2004)

The future is creeping up too quickly. Last week I read that a certain wine-tasting robot thinks humans taste like bacon. That was scary enough.

Then today I read something much more sobering. Military killer robots could endanger civilians. Sounds like they already are:

"The next thing that's coming, and this is what really scares me, are armed autonomous robots," said Prof Sharkey speaking to journalists in London. "The robot will do the killing itself. This will make decision making faster and allow one person to control many robots. A single soldier could initiate a large scale attack from the air and the ground.

"It could happen now; the technology's there."

A step on the way had already been taken by Israel with "Harpy", a pilotless aircraft that flies around searching for an enemy radar signal. When it thinks one has been located and identified as hostile, the drone turns into a homing missile and launches an attack - all without human intervention.

Last year the British aerospace company BAe Systems completed a flying trial with a group of drones that could communicate with each other and select their own targets, said Prof Starkey. The United States Air Force was looking at the concept of "swarm technology" which involved multiple drone aircraft operating together.

Flying drones were swiftly being joined by armed robot ground vehicles, such as the Talon Sword which bristles with machine guns, grenade launchers, and anti-tank missiles.

However it was likely to be decades before such robots possessed a human-like ability to tell friend from foe.

Even with human controllers, drones were already stacking up large numbers of civilian casualties.

As a result of 60 known drone attacks in Pakistan between January 2006 and April 2009, 14 al Qaida leaders had been killed but also 607 civilians, said Prof Sharkey.

The US was paying teenagers "thousands of dollars" to drop infrared tags at the homes of al Qaida suspects so that Predator drones could aim their weapons at them, he added. But often the tags were thrown down randomly, marking out completely innocent civilians for attack.

On a side note, those infrared tags are the missing piece of the CTTL puzzle that 60 Minutes never explained. The use of such tagging devices requires some human judgment. Though human judgment may be shitty and clouded by other motivations, I'll never trust a computer to make better decisions -- even one programmed with the three rules of robotics as outlined by Isaac Asimov:

Law I: A robot may not harm a human or, by inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Law II: A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Law III: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Though simple for a human to understand, those rules cannot be comprehended by computers without huge advances in artificial intelligence. But I'm veering off topic here. No military would even want that first law anyway.

When robots fight our wars with or without human intervention and there is not a single human casualty on our side, then what will be our incentive for peace?

Meanwhile, Cyclone Power Technologies wants to assure us that all their military robots are vegetarians. Well, that's a relief.

Future Woman

(Image found on Twitpic. Click to enlarge.)

I have a repeating dream -- actually it's a daydream -- where I imagine that somehow I've traveled back in time. Not too far back in time though. Maybe it's around 1947 where my government hosts will at least know what a transistor is. And then, much like the picture above, they want to quiz me about modern technology.

I could probably explain integrated circuits, personal computers, the rise of the Internet, and maybe even Moore's Law. But I'm not really sure I could ever explain what we do with it all and why.

The Future

Sometimes when I look backwards I appreciate the present more. Here is an example: 16 computer ads from the 1980's. It's too easy to smugly joke about slow processors and small hard drives, but #14 makes me laugh for other reasons. The ad's caption proclaims "user-friendly software," and the image of the "micro workstation" shows a classically cryptic directory listing from the Microsoft operating system. The number of bytes free is duly reported along side the sad blinking command prompt that intimidated every new user. Very friendly indeed.

Ad #13 holds a special place in my heart. At age 13, I really believed that when I plugged this cartridge and special keypad into my Atari 2600 I was going to feel like I was exploring the galaxy. Instead... actually, I really don't remember... I'm only left with a vague sense of disappointment in a game that's still gathering dust in the garage. And yes, in case you were wondering, I was rather nerdy for a girl. And yes, in case you were wondering, we never clean our garage.

But what has come of our hopes for space exploration, the future, and moving forward? What about the ideas of Tomorrowland? P.J. O'Rourke visited the famous Disney attraction and wrote about our apparently beige and unimaginative future:

Let us not confuse imagination with innovation or even with progress. Man’s descent from the trees and adoption of the brilliant mechanics of bipedalism were innovation and progress of the first order. But what did we do with this progress for our first million years as humans? As best we can tell, we hung around the Olduvai Gorge and beat some rocks together to make “chopping tools.”

On the other hand, the Italian Renaissance was so imaginative that during its three centuries, practically everything worth imagining was imagined. And yet not much was actually invented in Florence, Pisa, or Rome.

Global imagination, like global climate, seems to have cycles—natural, man-made, or whatever. Sometimes what people imagine for the future is bogged down in the literal—call it “blogged” for short. The last thousand years of the Roman Empire, for example, were no great shakes. The Romans had all the engineering necessary to start an industrial revolution. But they preferred to have toga parties and let slaves do all the work.

The Chinese had gunpowder but failed to arm their troops with guns. They possessed the compass but didn’t go much of anywhere. They invented paper, printing, and a written form of their language, but hardly anyone in China was taught to read.

So in 2009, looking at cool new gadgets might be fun, but I'm going to keep my eye open for the truly imaginative. Of course, dreamers risk looking foolish, but Leonardo da Vinci didn't see all his ideas come to fruition either.

Also, I have to get in touch with O'Rourke's daughter about that system of pneumatic tubes for delivering stuffed animals. That's what the world really needs.