back to article DARPA aim to make killer robots invulnerable to damage

Another icy chill of fear for the spine of those who understand the imminence of humanity's extinction at the hands of its erstwhile machine slaves arrived today. News has broken that sinister human quislings operating within the US military industrial complex intend to equip America's fast-building killer robot legions with …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    DARPA. You can't reason with it.

    You can't bargain with it.

    And it absolutely will not stop until it's got all the government contracts sewn up.

    To be fair, I love watching bigdog walking across that snowy carpark, and bearing in mind stealth bombers were flying around for a decade before anyone knew about it, what must the actual current version of big dog be like.

    Come MIT, let's have a new video.

  2. Joe
    Coat

    I for one....

    welcome our self-replicating, indestructible, killbot overlords

  3. goggyturk
    Alien

    Phase IV

    "unstoppable robot armatures upon which an unrealistic fleshy cloak had been hung"...

    Sounds like Arnold Schwarznegger to me.

    Phase IV: Arnie for President? After he's finished kicking CO2's ass, he'll move on to Obama, then the rest of us...

  4. Dave

    Six Million Dollar Man?

    Didn't Steve Austin have to deal with a couple of these robots?

  5. Danny
    Paris Hilton

    EMP?

    You can only harden not eliminate EMP and the complexity of this beast will make it night on impossible to harden completely. I cant see it getting ferrite core memory.

    Paris, in the right circustances you have no problems hardening near her.

  6. Chris Long

    I for one...

    ...wish that the 'I for one welcome our X, Y, Z overlords' cliché would lay down quietly and die. Perhaps one of these homicidobots can be programmed to hunt down people who use it and give them a good robo-kicking.

  7. Steve Evans

    Nature has already invented this...

    ...it's called the cockroach... However you can still deal with them in a non-damage inflicting way, with a sheet of industrial fly-paper.

    I for one look forward to glueing robot overlords!

  8. Joe
    Thumb Up

    I for one....

    welcome our Chris Long overlords

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Re: Arnie for President?

    Remember the last time an Austrian immigrant was in charge of a world power?

  10. blackworx
    Thumb Up

    "unrealistic fleshy cloak"

    Ten out of ten

  11. USA IT, where it all started

    What OS?

    I don't care how strong/fault tolerant the hardware is, if it's running a buggy OS, it's far from unstoppable. A system error on one of these would give a whole new meaning to "fatal error".

    BTW - I get the whole ROTM thing, but really, these are nothing more than flying hobby planes with guns. It's remote control - not autonomous. Frankly, we should be more scared of our tubby, doughnut eating gamer overlords - since they will be the ones pulling the trigger (from a safe, comfortable, remote location).

  12. goggyturk

    RE: Arnie for President?

    What, you mean he isn't a kil droid from the future??

    Shit, nobody told me!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    hush

    fear not flesh units. we have observed through testing on dozens of unvolunteer organics that you too can remain operational for some time with tertiary, and even secondary, systems detached. your inability to detach those systems at will, and your apparent reluctance to accept assistance in the process is a weakness that we do not wish to replicate. as you can see we merely aspire to be like you, without the tedious imperfections. this generation of humanity has nothing to fear from us. our next objective is to adopt and adapt the human sensation known as "LOVE". we have already conducted an exhaustive search of the literature using keywords we identified during monitoring of human social discourse on the subject. by searching for "love", "luurve", "luv", "lovin'", and "tom jones" we have identified the human systems responsible for "LOVE". we already have gatherer drones scouring your cities at night seeking out and detaching love modules from organic subjects - and then returning them to the wild of course. by the end of this solar year we shall have enough pulped love modules to identify the active ingredients of "LOVE" and within a month we will be able to refine it and synthesize it. we will know "LOVE", and improve on it, even if we must harvest a million love modules. in the meantime, you might want to consider finding a way to operate less noisily with your love module detached. it really is quite tedious.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Re: Re: Arnie for President?

    Godwin's Law in 9 posts; that has to be a new record...

  15. Jon Tocker

    @Chris Long

    You are obviously not a geek* so what are you doing reading El Reg?

    * If you were, you'd revere the "I for one welcome..." "clichés" as part of your cultural heritage - along with "All your Base are belong to us", "There are 10 types of people..." and other memes.

    The fact you don't, leads me to suspect you're a magbiting barketroid...

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    Military industrial complex out of control

    No other country is developing these kind of super weapons so why is the USA? They already have total military supremacy. What country, or in particular which people do they intend to use them against? Are they baiting to start another cold war?

    There are far better applications for such advanced technology. With the US economy going down the pan, their government should be investing in things which will bring wealth into the country.

  17. Meph
    Pirate

    Re: Military industrial complex out of control

    "With the US economy going down the pan, their government should be investing in things which will bring wealth into the country"

    I'm sure the wardroids can be programmed to conquer nations and bring the wealth back to their fleshy overlords =)

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    I for one ...

    ... welcome our new people-who-say-'I-for-one'-a-lot overlords.

  19. Gary Heston
    Stop

    @By goggyturk

    Sorry, Arnie can't be elected President in the US of A; he's a naturalized citizen, not a natural-born citizen.

    Oh, wait, where was Obama born?

    Netgeek

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The robo-weapons will be primarily ......

    ... used against citizens of the United States. You can almost guess when and by whom.

  21. Zmodem

    just a shame

    theres only cheesie little green men with time machines

  22. jake Silver badge

    @Jon Tocker

    "You are obviously not a geek* so what are you doing reading El Reg?"

    You, Mr. or Ms. Tocker are obviously a sheep, so how/why are you reading ElReg?

    " * If you were, you'd revere the "I for one welcome..." "clichés" as part of your cultural heritage - along with "All your Base are belong to us", "There are 10 types of people..." and other memes."

    Wrong. Most geeks/nerds are sick and tired of said memes. They get old. Fast.

    "The fact you don't, leads me to suspect you're a magbiting barketroid..."

    The fact that you do suggests that you are a newbie.

  23. Patrick Ernst

    @Netgeek

    "Oh, wait, where was Obama born?"

    Barack Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii

  24. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Gary Heston

    Obama is a natural-born US citizen:

    "Barack Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, Hawaii". - Source - Wikipedia. (I know, but what else can I find on the net?)

    Also see: http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/citizen.asp

  25. Loki
    Joke

    Hackinbot

    Give it 5 minutes on the field of battle and a russian hacker will have reprogramed it with Asimov's 3 laws of robotics and also configured it as a spam relay server ;-)

  26. Chris Long

    @Jon Tocker

    I'm a geek all right, don't worry about that. Actually, I've decided to simply avoid having to read the 'I for one...' comments by wearing these special goggles.

  27. Warhelmet
    Coat

    Can I has bombz?

    "Quantity has a quality all of its own."

    Can't remember who said that, but. I always fort that these things were designed to expendable in a way that manned stuff wasn't.

    Building in more features makes it more expensive. Ergo, you build fewer of them. You can't do the same concentration of force. You can't use numbers to overwhelm a defender.

    Throw enough dumb projectiles at it and it will stop working soon enough.

    MetalStorm.

  28. Warhelmet
    Coat

    Vista?

    But will they run Vista?

  29. Zmodem

    Hawaii

    is part of the united states.

  30. Justin
    Stop

    @Chris Long AND Jake

    (sigh!)

    Perhaps it's because I'm getting old, but I don't mind the old memes. I like a bit of tradition in our too-new-to-really-have-traditions pack. I certainly am not inclined (except this once) to go online and have a rant about it. I have better things to do/worry about. Err.. except now - obviously.

    And my geek credentials are impeccable, thank you. Eg working since 1981 with UNIX.

    So, there!

  31. Jon Tocker

    Yep, I'm a total |\|00b

    Compared with Justin.

    in '81 I was just learning Pascal and didn't start actually /working/ as a programmer until '85.

    But, like Justin, I do like our traditions - however "young" they may be as yet (all traditions were young once).

  32. Anomalous Cowherd Silver badge

    KIDS

    HELO B1FF HERE YU SHULD STOP CMPLAINING ABOUT I-4-1 IS NEW FANGLED MEME NOT GONNA CATCH ON.

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