Robot Wars

EyesWideOpen writes "According to this New York Times article (free reg. req.) the Office of Naval Research is coordinating an effort to determine what it will take to build a system that will make it possible for autonomous vehicles (in the air and on the ground), or A. V.'s, to serve as soldiers on the battlefield. The project, called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman, would consist of a network in which the highest-flying of the A. V.'s 'will communicate with headquarters, transmitting data and receiving commands. The commands will be passed along to a team of lower-flying A.V.'s that will relay them in turn to single drones serving as liaisons for squadrons of A.V.'s.' The article also mentions that the A. V.'s will have the ability to send high resolution color video as well as still photographs using MPEG-4 compression. Pretty interesting stuff."

Skynet, here we come

[quark2universe]

Won't these people learn? Didn't they see the Terminator? Don't they know if they build this it will come back and bite them in the ass? Haven't I asked enough questions for one post?

Future war

[Graspee_Leemoor]

So what they're going to do is basically conduct future wars like in certain RTS games- i.e. we see in certain RTS games in FMV footage, that "you" are some guy controlling remote units via some terminal in some concrete bunker.

This of course has been predicted by many SF authors for years, and even surpassed where we have the case of AIs continuing to generate units and attack each other long after all the humans are dead.

Karma will now be dispensed, yea! I say, dispensed to those posters who can cite authors and works as examples of this.

graspee

Re:Skynet, here we come

[jejones]

Won't these people learn? Didn't they see the Terminator?

Haven't you read the Bolo stories? If I remember Laumer's timeline, we're way overdue for GM to start on the Mark I. :)

<serious>I share Asimov's disgust with the pessimism and "there are things man was not meant to know" attitude, a disgust which pushed him to write his robot stories. There are good and evil humans (I see the Bill Gates Borg icon as I type....)--what is it about AI that makes people think it will automatically be evil?</serious>

For the honor of the regiment,
jejones

Re:T3: Rise of the Machines

[Tackhead]

> They just started playing adds in the movie theatres for T3, Rise of the Machines.
>
> It looks like the army is continuing their new public relationship actions of making the forces look cool.

Look cool?

Dude. This is Slashdot. Giant armies of killer robots don't look cool -- giant armies of killer robots are cool.

Morality of war...

[telbij]

Well war ethics are going to have to be completely re-written if this happens, because previously the idea was that to win a war you had to send some soldiers to their death. If we don't have to send in soldiers anymore then the American public will be easily distracted from our hideously hypocritical foreign policy decisions since they don't actually have to worry about their sons and daughters.

Re:Already in Wired

[Tackhead]

> Sounds cool to me, but do we really have a problem with US soldiers life loss when we go in to fight a country?

I dunno. Ask a soldier.

If, 30 seconds later, your ass hasn't been kicked, thank him for his restraint. :-)

> I guess the little suckers could go where men could not and do things that men would not...

Yes - that's precisely the idea. Robots are a force multiplier - you can send them on high-risk missions that you wouldn't want to risk a man for.

In that sense, the use of robots in war isn't much different from robots in space exploration. There are some jobs (like geology on Mars) that a man might be better at than a robot. There are many, many, many jobs (like mapping the entire Martian surface, or missions to the outer planets), where the robot is the right tool for the job.

Re:M.I.N.U.M.A.M. ??

[Ralph Wiggam]

Besides the aweful acronym, we already have a weapons system called the Minuteman. It would be a damn shame if some top brass ordered a test of these robots and launched our ICBMs instead.

-B

Re:Robotic Battlefield?

[Darth_Burrito]

Maybe the friendly soldiers wear special "don't kill me" underwear that takes part in some sort of encrypted authentication with the killer robot dogs.

Of course the round trip for something like that would take a while ... and we can't be storing all our private keys in robot dogs that could potentially be captured, nor would we necessarily want enemy soldiers depancing our POWs.

the armed forces of a democracy...

[Anonymous Coward]

...must come from the people themshelves. the constitution of every free nation must be based on the nation itself.Every individual is responsible for the preservation of freedom in his or her country.That is the basis on which every constitution is founded:That it is guaranteed by the people. And that's why you can't outsource the struggle for freedom to some stupid company making some stupid machines.If you break the equation, then NOBODY on earth can guarantee your freedom, it will be taken away before you know it. Or do you think that it will be long before those machines are used to impose a dictatorial regime on you? Think twice before you say that many lives can be saved. It may eventualy require many many more sacrifices to restore the potential damage.

Re:What's the progress?

[noahmax]

i've got a bunch of technical papers related to the minuteman project that i used as background for the times story. they're a bit long to post on /. but i'd be happy to send 'em to whoever wants to see. shoot me an e-mail at [e-mail] if you're interested. nms