This is a development that will surely strike the dispassionate rationalist like a cattle prod driven into the ‘common sense’ nerve cluster of the amygdala: it turns out that giving robots guns isn’t a good idea.
Last year, three armed ground bots were deployed to Iraq. But the remote-operated SWORDS units were almost immediately pulled off the battlefield, before firing a single shot at the enemy. Here at the conference, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey, was asked what happened to SWORDS. After all, no specific reason for the 11th-hour withdrawal ever came from the military or its contractors at Foster-Miller. Fahey’s answer was vague, but he confirmed that the robots never opened fire when they weren’t supposed to. His understanding is that “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move.” In other words, the SWORDS swung around in the wrong direction, and the plug got pulled fast. No humans were hurt, but as Fahey pointed out, “once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.”
This isn’t just bad news for the KillBot industry. It sets a bad precedent: human casualties are not acceptable. How will the nascent HugBot industry get off the ground if we can’t accept the risk of a few early testers being accidentally hugged to death?
Non-Answer on Armed Robot Pullout From Iraq Reveals Fragile Bot Industry [Popular Mechanics]
ah, good ol’ Hug Bot…
The footage of the aborted test is here.
Good thing no one got hurt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0kWgcIlWn0
ahhh… sweet nostalgic ultra violence.
I miss the days when dystopian fiction was still fiction.
“No humans were hurt.” Which is apparently a good result for a malfunctioning battlefield robot. Sweet, sweet irony.
Swords will fucking cut you wide open!!!
The Register has a great take on this one:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/11/us_war_robot_rebellion_iraq/
“Apparently, alert American troops managed to quell the traitorous would-be droid assassins before the inevitable orgy of mechanised slaughter began. Fahey didn’t say just how, but conceivably the rogue robots may have been suppressed with help from more trustworthy airborne kill machines, or perhaps prototype electropulse zap bombs.”
Check the comments…
I guess they were something of a two-edged sword.
“I miss the days when dystopian fiction was still fiction.”
When was that, exactly?