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.

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.

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.