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World War II German Robots Robotic weapons, the term send chills down the backs of many people and the more they know about the subject, the more scared they are. Why is this? In a simple explanation one would have to say, because there is no way to test these things in a real world combat situation. That means even though they could pass every simulation, something could happen when they are sent into combat that was totally unexpected and that we might not have an answer to. We have to realize that sometimes when mistakes are made by robots, they don't think it is a mistake. After all they are just following a software program with many different parameters. The combination of parameters could be astronomical and might branch off to other choices and so on. Just one tiny mistake in code or one unforeseen combinations that might lead to disaster. Even robots that have been programmed not to harm humans could have a flaw in that programming that would allow them to hurt us under some very rare instances. One of those instances might be if they don't think that we are human anymore. Military robots are becoming more popular every day. Thousands of missions were flown in 2010 by robotic planes, but if we look closely at the news reports, we find something very chilling. Let's look at what is going on in Pakistan. We are continuously sending robot planes in to destroy terrorist meeting places, homes where they are said to live and even cars they are driving in. Most people would say that this is a great thing. Looking closer at these strikes we see that they are not as surgical as we have been led to believe and some figures indicate that we have killed quite a few innocent people with collateral damage. Collateral damage is when you hit the target, but other people near it also get killed or wounded. This means that while we are killing terrorists we are creating more terrorists, because those people that were innocent that we killed, or wounded will hate us along with their families. The robot planes are mostly controlled by humans right now, but that is changing and there are a few that can fly on their own and these no doubt will cause even more collateral damage. The whole idea is to only kill the enemy.
Predator UAV A report has come out from the Office of Naval Research and it states that soon robots will be able to make battlefield decisions that are now reserved for humans. It goes on to say that robots could gain significant cognitive advantages over humans. One computer scientist stated, “There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do”. He goes on to say that this is outmoded thought and harkens back to when one person could write a program and understand it. Today many programmers are involved in writing millions of lines of computer code for these robotic machines, increasing the chances of there being an error in the code that gets overlooked, or of certain reactions from different combinations of subroutines that are not anticipated. Some scientists want to program all military robots with ethics programs before installing the instructions for warfare, which means even more code to put into the machines. Others think that even this just increases the complexity of the programming. After all isn’t it easier to say to the machine in its programming environment, “go to building X and blow it up”, without have to say, “go to building X, check it for women and children, or innocent civilians and if there are none there, blow up the building”? When military robots are programmed they are supposed to have certain fail safes, that can stop or destroy them if the need arises. Last year a robotic helicopter decided not to obey its human masters. The machine was a MQ-8 robotic helicopter. Somehow its program had gotten corrupted and it began heading into restricted airspace over Washington, D.C. The people watching the copter were frantically trying to get it back, but to no avail. When instructions fail, usually the robot planes begin to circle until the error is corrected, but this did not happen here. The copter just kept flying toward Washington. The chopper is known as the Fire Scout and a US Navy Captain stated, "Fire Scout robochopper, carrying out a test flight from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, lost link and proceeded 23 miles north/northwest into restricted airspace,” The operating team was finally able to restore a link to the chopper and get it to return when they moved to a different ground control station.
TALON SWORDS US Army Robots The United States is not the only country turning to robot weapons, as a matter of fact much of the world is. This means that there will be more robots that will encounter errors than ever. Some countries may have less stringent requirements for battlefield robots than others and this could cause even more errors. South Africa had a fatal robot error a few years ago. They had built a robot cannon and all looked fine until the cannon decided to begin firing on its own. The outcome was 9 dead and 14 seriously wounded. The malfunction was described as a small explosion, the gun jamming and then firing. The gun was an anti-aircraft cannon that is designed to lock on to targets, that are flying fast and low, with radar. Basically it is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) killer, or in simpler terms a flying robot killer. While the military said this was a mechanical failure, some engineers have stated that they don't think so and that it was a software error that caused the carnage. In 2009 there was a complaint from Lt. Gen Rick Lynch. He was stationed in Iraq. He said that he lost 155 men in combat and that 122 might have been saved if we had more capable robots. He went on to say that 80% of those soldiers didn't have to die. He wasn't talking about only autonomous robots, but also remote controlled ones. I can see his point. He would like to see more machines that are capable of going into buildings and such, thus releasing his men from having to risk their lives doing this. Apparently there has been some reluctance by the military to send a lot of these machines into Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now this would give us a big advantage, but in the future that might disappear as robot fights robot. Now it would be robot against human, which is much easier. The Russians had some of the very first robots. They used robot tanks in 1939 in the invasion of Finland, but have fallen behind in robot development. They hope to reverse this trend with new robots that they are developing for their civilian and military forces. See the link below: There is no doubt about it, we are getting to the point where robots may someday do all the fighting and the civilians will be caught in the middle. Some countries may not put ethical software into their robots and if they were to get through to cities, the robots could be responsible for the worst atrocities in the history of the world. There would be no pity here, just destruction.
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