Anyone else watching the new terminator series on TV?

Automated killer robots 'threat to humanity': expert

http://news.smh.com.au/automated-killer-robots-threat-to-humanity-expert/20080227-1v6s.html

Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.

"They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain's Royal United Services Institute.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world -- from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones -- can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 US military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by US arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, said Sharkey.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

Washington plans to spend four billion US dollars by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to 24 billion, according to the Department of Defense's Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.

Interesting - we have robots to kill and maim and for the lucky survivors - robots to nurse them back to health.  


Quote:

Robots Giving a Break to Doctors This should deprive nurses their sleep because soon they are going to have deadly competitors that will take their jobs. Robots are doing the rounds for doctors and what is involved is the practitioner could be anywhere, inside the hospital or far away from it, and the robot will do the rounds on the doctor's behalf and the doctor will interact with the patients asking them questions since the robot has a screen and a camera. That is all it can do for now, which means it cannot check their pulse or measure their blood pressure, a feat that will not be difficult to accomplish as all the patients might have to do will be to follow instruction and can check their own pulse using the robots stethoscope and the robot will record it, while they could do the same with their blood pressure where they can use a pad that is attached to the robot. The particular robot that is being tried at Baltimore Sinai Hospital costs $150,000 and the doctor who is using is a weight watch surgeon. According to him the patients like it, because they can interact with him as if he was there in person. There are around 120 such robots used around the world and interestingly enough their performance level had been superb since patients were able to leave hospitals earlier, which means they could enhance the follow up process, because it can be made to work round the clock, including nights. They are also useful in case of emergency when the doctors are not around and they can hold teleconferencing with the staff and the patients and could solve many problems from afar.

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Sharkey is obviously not a scientist, otherwise he wouldn't make such a stupid statement as "it wouldn't be difficult to reverse-engineer".

These things will be almost impossible to reverse engineer, as the software and command controls are encrypted, and require sophisticated equipment to control.  Sharkey talks as if these are just toasters or some HAL that you can just talk to.

How long would the encryption last in enemy hands?

what kind of equipment and education do you think terrorists have exactly?  Wiring up a bomb is a heck of a lot different from cracking 128bit encryption.  Even if you could crack it - these "robots" are remote devices, not self-thinking terminators.  You can't just make a remote device - those things are sophisticated.  Furthermore, defense scientists build in fail-safe devices precisely for the times that the robots fall in enemy hands.

freediver wrote on Mar 19^th, 2008 at 9:02am:

How long would the encryption last in enemy hands?

About as long as 128 bit encryption lasts generally assuming they have highly skilled technicians and very fast computers and assuming everyone on the planet networked to help the terrorist it should only take a few thousand years.

But I would think a self destruct mechanism would have worked before then so it would be a colossal waste of time.