

Robots at War: I for one, welcome our new robot overlords - iamelgringo
http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=496613

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biohacker42
Robots will lower the threshold for war.

Bombs are not precise, and even solders tend to be a bit too generous with the
machine gun.

But robots can be much more accurate, can be mass produced, and nobody cries
over them.

Less collateral damage and no risk to your own soldiers - perfect.

In the future we will very likely see an industrialized nation trying to
pacify a non industrialized trouble spot with robots.

The more interesting question is, what about technological equals.

Presumably that concerns only entities cable of producing sophisticated
robots.

That might actually include developing nations like India and Pakistan.

China and the US are just too economically integrated to have a full on war.

But India and Pakistan might decide to settle Kashmir with robots.

What we would have then is most likely robots pushing people off land they
consider home.

That's gonna be bad.

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ivankirigin
Technically, you might want to say "robots will lower the threshold to
attack". Like a cruise missile, they make it so you can act without launching
an entire war.

And like other precise munitions, they are tools. There is nothing different
about a robot.

People get a bit too excited about robots because of Sci-Fi. But they are just
machines.

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ph0rque
I've been thinking about warbots lately. I don't think they will be very
effective, because as soon as a given model is hacked, sending a pack of
robots on a given offensive will be equivalent to giving them away to the
enemy, assuming the enemy is savvy enough.

If the robots are remotely sent instructions, then remote hacking will be
possible. If they have the instructions downloaded to a media, then it would
be possible to "reboot" the robots with the enemy's software.

It wouldn't be trivial, but it would be possible. I think a robust black
market will spring up soon after the first robots go on the offensive.

~~~
streety
The vulnerable part will be the communications. If an enemy can decipher the
communication channels then they can send false instructions. Having said this
how is it different to the situation today when the soldiers are for the most
part human. Would it really be that hard to convince a unit to retreat or to
fire artillery on their own frontline troops? As we already occasionally see
'blue-on-blue' incidents I would argue it isn't.

The danger with robots would certainly be greater but it is not a new threat.

~~~
ph0rque
True, but it is rather difficult to convince an e.g. blue soldier that he is,
in fact, red. Not so with robots, assuming you can reverse engineer their
software.

~~~
streety
I agree that the potential consequences of a breach would be significantly
greater with robots than with human soldiers.

Most of the wars I'm aware about during the past few decades have been highly
asymmetric technologically or have been between technologically limited
forces. In the first case the likelihood is that only the more technologically
advanced force would utilise robots and would be able to secure them beyond
the capabilities of the technologically inferior opposing force to compromise.
In the second case neither side is likely to have robots fighting.

If this trend holds true for the future then 'warbots' are going to be
increasingly used.

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robertk
The US Department of Defense should be renamed to the Department of Offense.

War talk makes me sick. The only benefit I see from it is the necessary
advancement of nanotechnology, which will hopefully help in bringing the
singularity to speed.

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ovi256
Kids, here's my first law : "Anything that can be automatized will be
automatized".

Let's apply it : can war be automatized ? The answer is a resounding yes! So
war will be automatized, _whatever the consequences_.

~~~
yters
And how's it going to be automatized? Over the network. Therefore, whoever
owns the network owns the weapons platform. Sounds like a book title.

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bprater
What happens when both sides are almost exclusively using robots? Will war
become a game?

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ivankirigin
Both sides using nukes still means people die and war is not a game. Just
because people use robots doesn't mean the targets will be robots.

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DanielBMarkham
This is a good, involved, and deep article on robotics in warfare. Some of the
memes, like "cost to go to war" are quite frankly old chestnuts -- true for
hundreds of years and just repeated here. (I'm reminded of one' historian's
view of the American Civil War -- the north would have won anyway because,
compared to other civil wars, the north really was never completely committed)

I began reading the article due to the cute title iamelgringo gave it --
here's a plug for re-editing titles for the HN audience.

What concerns me is what wasn't mentioned: the goal of warfare is to make the
other side stop fighting. We will certainly develop and create expensive
drones and such for the elimination of enemy combatants. As the Air Force
lieutenant general forecasts in the article, that "given the growth trends, it
is not unreasonable to postulate future conflicts involving tens of thousands
[of drones]"

But that's assuming we fight wars the way we want to fight them, instead of
the wars we end up with. In the article, the example is given of a little
ground bot made for recon. Soldiers quickly learned that you could strap a
claymore on the front of the bot and use it as sort of an intelligent roaming
land mine. Cost of such a new kind of bot? About $5K.

To make the other side stop fighting, you don't necessarily have to engage his
military or command centers. I can see non-state actors evolving cheap bots to
attack civilians and instill fear. Instead of a smart bomb, I guess you'd call
it a smart terrorist bomb -- perhaps hundreds of RC airplanes with intelligent
chips and biological weapons as payloads, or RC cars loaded with C-4 that wait
in storm drains for days or weeks on end to launch a coordinated attack.

Bots are coming in war, like it or not. But what concerns me isn't the big
Matrix-type bots: it's the power of small, cheap, smart bots that about
anybody can assemble in bulk.

