Killer Robots Will Kill Us All
Noel Sharkey, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Sheffield, England, is worried about murderous automatons. Citing the prevalence of armed drones in Iraq and Afghanistan, Professor Sharkey foresees a frightening future in which these heartless killing machines spread death indiscriminately.
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.
Lest you think the professor is some kind of techno-alarmist who has watched too many Terminator movies—and, frankly, we've given you no reason to think otherwise this far—he also says this:
If we keep on using robot weapons we're going to put civilians at grave risk and it's going to be much easier to start wars. The main inhibitor of wars is body bags coming home.
Which is an absolutely true and correct point. But it's way less sexier than KILLER ROBOTS WILL KILL US ALL, which I think I will use as a headline. I mean, who's going to click through on "Guided Drones Will Desensitize Us To True Costs Of Conflict"? You? I didn't think so.
I clicked through! I clicked through! And all you got was this lousy comment.
In my defense, the killer robot in my closet made me do it.
It all started with the BuffyBot.
"If we keep on using robot weapons we’re going to put civilians at grave risk…"
I don't understand the professor's use of tense here.
Wait until the robots start writing blog posts. They already are responsible for half the comments. Cialis, anyone?
Oh, they write blog posts, too. Google pages had (have?) a big problem with bot-created (and published) pages, with nothing but key words, etc.
But if the robots are just destroying other robots, what are the true costs of conflict? Ball bearings? Processors? TELL ME!
I can't wait till an election turns on accusations of a candidate freeing an electronic Willie Horton.
Robot Wars was canceled ten years ago.
But in the picture, those are clones, not robots… heee
meanwhile noel sharkey is making me envisage a terrifying future where noel gallagher and feargal sharkey get married and produce the MOR rock of doom…
Please, I have enough to worry about with sharks right now.
I met him once at some talk by a Japanese roboticist. He is totally insane, he contended that all film and videogame makers were part of this government thing to desensitize children so they could just make perfect drone pilots and kill without remorse.
I asked him if he ever saw the film Toys – he hadn't.