
Killing Robot Being Tested by Lockheed Martin - saikat
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/killing_robot_b.html
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markessien
You know, this would be a good thing. Imagine that countries had robots that
where so overwhelming in force, agility and firepower, that no army could
resist them. No combination of tanks and airplanes could defeat such a fleet
of robots.

In that case, there is no need to kill the civilians any longer. If two
technologically advanced nations battle each other, and the robot fleet of one
of the nations is destroyed, the battle is lost. Still fighting would be
pointless, because you lose people, and the other guy does not even lose
machines.

So we'd just have a huge robot battle in the desert that we could watch on TV,
and when our country lost, we'd resign ourselves to the invading force and
just give up (or run).

I guess the strategy then would be to wait till the human military
administrators come in, and then start a low level insurgency.

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jcl
...which reminds me of a line from R.J. Gatling:

 _"It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by
its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred,
that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and
consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling>

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markessien
Well, he was right. Imagine the invasion of Iraq with swords and men on
horses. You would need millions and the deaths would have been in hundreds of
thousands of soldiers.

Guns end wars quicker.

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Retric
Without guns and bombs I think the conflict would have ended sooner. Well
trained armed forces using bow and arrow are extremely effective to the point
where untrained forces have little chance of winning. For a historical example
consider what the mongol army did and how long it took. The reason why
insurgency and non traditional warfare has become effective is how little
training someone needs to use hit and run tactics and a gun.

PS: Picture a tank using a balista and protected by bow and arrow. It's not
rapid fire but without guns / high explosives it's just about as hard to stop.

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cabalamat
> _Without guns and bombs I think the conflict would have ended sooner. Well
> trained armed forces using bow and arrow are extremely effective to the
> point where untrained forces have little chance of winning. For a historical
> example consider what the mongol army did and how long it took. The reason
> why insurgency and non traditional warfare has become effective is how
> little training someone needs to use hit and run tactics and a gun._

Counterexample: it took Julius Caesar 7 years to conquer Gaul. Then there's
the Hundred years War, fought over much the same terrain.

Some other modern examples: Iran-Iraq War: lasted 8 years, was a draw; 1991
Gulf War: lasted one month.

German invasions of France: 1970 - quick victory; 1914 - bogged down; 1940 -
quick victory

I suspect the technology used during a war has little effect on its duration.

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Retric
The hundred year war was a single war in name only.

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cabalamat
True, but the individual conflicts that were part of it lasted a long time.

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srn
How is this a robot any more than any other missile? Not to say they aren't
cool... but if I could mod this down I would for being misleading.

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uuilly
A cruise missile is a controlled. The future "robots" will be autonomous.
There are plenty of UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicle) used in different theaters
but very few (public) UAAV's (unmanned autonomous aerial vehicle.) A UAV has a
pilot at a ground station in Florida, a UAAV has none. It is given a mission
and it has objectives with priorities and, if it faces resistance or bad
weather it thinks for itself.

The "killer robot" headline is silly. The interesting trend is that autonomous
weapons systems are operating with fewer and fewer men in the loop.

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StrawberryFrog
You say "trend ... fewer and fewer men in the loop." and I say "smooth
transition to robots".

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ivankirigin
If you bring up terminator when talking about today's robots, you don't know
anything about robotics.

Cluster bombs, landmines, nukes, etc. are all much better kill-bots.

The ethics are also trivial: killing civilians is bad. Torture is bad. Killing
armed combatants is ok.

Robots are going to be _more_ ethical, because operators won't react
instinctively but logically. No one wants to kill civilians. A robot entering
a house in Fallujah will be less trigger happy.

I find myself writing this comment every few weeks. People don't know anything
about robotics.

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thomasmallen
If people can hack computers, people will be able to hack robots (should they
be able in any way to respond to commands, which they'd better). This is a
frightening prospect.

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ivankirigin
You can hack a gun pretty easily. You point it at someone and pull the
trigger.

There is nothing different really. They will be weapons, just like today's
weapons.

There are certainly security issues. That isn't unique to robots though. The
"robots will kill you" mindset really isn't useful.

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thomasmallen
Firing a gun from the other side of the world is not so easy. Or firing the
gun when it's in the hand of another.

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ivankirigin
Rogue killer robots are then equivalent to other asymmetric battles. They are
a lot like suicide bombers. Except they have giant robot lasers and are easy
to spot, unlike a cell that looks like everyone else.

Either way, my point is that the ethics are not at all ambiguous. You put
security measures in all your weapons, and you shouldn't think of robots as
any different. That is my point.

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ComputerGuru
This reminds me of a killing robot developed for the Israeli Military and
completed last year:

[http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/viper-the-israeli-murder-
machi...](http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/viper-the-israeli-murder-machine/)

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nickb
Obey the first law, please!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics>

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ASUmusicMAN
Although Schneier mentions the need of discussing the rules in his post, the
whole "killer robots" already has me losing hope for following rule one.

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icey
We live in a capitalist society where a sizable portion of our GDP is derived
from defense spending. I'm afraid the rules were doomed from the start.

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DanielBMarkham
Misleading title. This is an anti-anti-missile system, not a killer robot.

Geesh. I was expecting the terminator and I got Star Wars.

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thomasmallen
I can't believe my tax dollars go towards this shit.

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iamwil
All the thrusters are in a circular plane around the KV. How does it balance
itself front to back when its thrusters are all in a 2D plane?

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a-priori
My guess is it either has thrusters on an angle to the plane that we're not
seeing, or it has an internal gyroscope.

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RobertL
Wow. Just in time. I think the Greek Government needs a couple dozen of these
things and it needs them right now.

