If someone weaponizes our robots, we'll be really, really sad, says Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics and five other robot makers have promised in an open letter they won't allow their machines to be weaponized by either themselves or their customers. Yes, never mind robotics corporations tooling up their equipment for militaries and other organizations, some people are trying to modify commercial robots by …
First, the military will want robots to, e.g., clear mines and defuse bombs and secure hazardous environments. Good, humanitarian applications we can all get behind.
Then they'll be drafted into reconnaissance and spying roles. At this point they'll probably have an explosive charge embedded so that they can self-destruct if captured and autopsied.
By this time the military will know enough about them to make modifications without the manufacturer's support. Before long they'll be on sentry duty, if not actually carrying guns then certainly connected to the controls of a nearby turret.
When you're in a war, not using your best resources is just stupid.
It's really not that hard to evolve control systems for robots using nature inspired methods. Simulate a few thousand robots for a few thousand 'years' on a supercomputer and you'll end up with an analogue of natural evolution, and can then just transfer that neural net to the real thing in the physical world. I expect there to be military drones/robots in the open literature very soon, ornithopters that fly just like real birds, can find thermals, swoop and soar, and have GUNS in their beaks and know what to fire at thanks to a thousand years of reinforcement learning :D
Or maybe we'll make insects, a few grams each, with nerve agent tipped stingers. And mass produce millions of them to drop over an enemy.
Good point. Why don't we just simulate politicians to get politician robots? Moreover, we can manufacture only robot politician heads, since most of the politicians are just talking heads anyway. Cheaper, and we can put them in a special soundproofed container where they can argue with each other as much as they like.
The recoil from a gun is a pretty significant and sudden acceleration that would be unlike other types of acceleration that might occur from e.g. getting bumped, having something thrown at it, etc.
They could probably train their robot's AI to detect it, and if detected shut down and require a manual reset. That would make it useless to use it in a scenario where it may need to fire a weapon, other than where it would only need to fire one shot before being manually retrieved.
The recoil from a gun is a pretty significant .... train their robot's AI to detect it,
Thats sounds like a really minor issue compared to the tech they've achieved in these robots .
Guns can be made recoil less (like a Bren gun ) , and they wouldnt need to *detect* the recoil - they know when they've pulled the trigger!
"recoil" from incoming fire might be harder to deal with - but perhaps theyd be better getting knocked on their shiny metal asses in that case so as to take immediate cover !
...recoil from a gun is a pretty significant...probably train their robot's AI to detect it...
That won't stop them from being used to lay mines or used as suicide bombs or dozens of other offensive roles.
The main problem is battery life, most uses need an umbilical for command and power - all the manufacturers of robots seem a bit coy about autonomous operation.
could also be taken as a bit sinister:
"To be clear, we are not taking issue with existing technologies that nations and their government agencies use to defend themselves and uphold their laws."
The tinfoil hat says Government will always get the un-patched firmware...
Yes, the message I was getting loud and strong was that "bad actors" is probably not going to apply to any country's duly-appointed military. Maybe not even to military forces engaged by the "right" nationstates - mercs, sorry, "contractors", are hired by various governments all the time.
And that wasn't the only prevaricating phrase in that statement.
If we could only get the Chinese to spend all their R&D money and science/engineering talent on increasingly complex and expensive weapons systems we could bring down their whole system.
Congratulations; you've successfully described the Strategy of Technology. which used to be a military textbook.
"A gigantic technological race is in progress between interception and penetration and each time capacity for interception makes progress it is answered by a new advance in capacity for penetration. Thus a new form of strategy is developing in peacetime, a strategy of which the phrase ‘arms race’ used prior to the old great conflicts is hardly more than a faint reflection.There are no battles in this strategy; each side is merely trying to outdo in performance the equipment of the other. It has been termed ‘logistic strategy’. Its tactics are industrial, technical, and financial. It is a form of indirect attrition; instead of destroying enemy resources, its object is to make them obsolete, thereby forcing on him an enormous expenditure….
A silent and apparently peaceful war is therefore in progress, but it could well be a war which of itself could be decisive."
--General d’Armee Andre Beaufre
And anybody denying that technological war works needs to take a good hard look at Ukraine. The Russians dropped out, and ended up so far behind that their equipment wasn't capable of competing with western weapon systems. (Which to be fair, they didn't expect to encounter)
As a result of which, light anti tank weapons were able to blow up soviet battletanks.
Shoulder launched SAM's cleared the sky of aircraft and helicopters.
Cheapish anti RADAR missiles destroyed Russian Surface to Air Missile batteries, allowing their army to be bombed from the air with impunity.
Russian Infantry found that their rifle bullets didn't reliably penetrate the modern body armour that the Ukrainians were gifted.
China might well be interested in competing, but they can't do so against the combined Military R&D of every other country in the world, and I suspect that they know it. North Korea and Iran have seen what happens when massed collections of outdated equipment clash with a small subset of modern military technology countries were willing to share with Ukraine, and will realise that they haven't even been given a lot of our heavy equipment because we don't want to show what it can actually do. I think they'll have lost any appetite for foreign adventures that they might have had.
And so after Russia finally accepts that they have lost in Ukraine and gets out, we can say welcome to the Pax Technologia.
"They go where they are told, and they hit who they're told to hit."
It's not beyond the bounds of programming for an AI to recognise a human and refuse to hit it. Okay, some days it'll mistake the human for a bicycle. But if it stops it most of the time, that's a win. It could be law 1, part 1, "A robot may not injure a human being..."
And it will be hard to hack if it's fundamental part of the model that does collision avoidance and motion control.
Why bother ? The AI will signal that it recognized a human then the hitting will be delegated to a secondary less-intelligent system which will take action based on this signal. Problem solved!
Wouldn't have to hack the whole thing. I'd probably use augmented reality "slipons" to sensors. These slipons would sample the surrounding environment and render and output a modified sensor scene to the existing hardware through analog means.
"Maybe finally a good use for DRM, eh? Preventing armed modifications"
The sort of criminals who are going to weaponise the robots against the terms of license are the sorts who can crack DRM in a matter of minutes.
So again, just like everything else; the DRM will only hurt us little guys who want to use the robot to waddle around their garden cleaning up dog turd.
"The sort of criminals who are going to weaponise the robots against the terms of license are the sorts who can crack DRM in a matter of minutes."
They are also closely aligned with the group that can pass a law that says they don't have to abide by any DRM protections in their case.
this is 100% in relation to this video by youtuber "I did a thing"...
bored Australians seem to work faster than any military
AI autonomous targeting and killing is a Nirvana for any military, TLA or law enforcement of any country. It allows to dodge responsibility for any collateral death of innocent people. As an added bonus, it can even offer plausible deniability by blaming a bug in the algorithms.
On the other hand, let's say a robot rolls or walks up to a car stopped for speeding or some violation, to request a drivers license. There is no excuse for the robot to blow away the driver because it mistakenly thought the driver's cell phone was a gun. A robot should not get "qualified immunity", because it is not alive. Or, if the driver is desperate and violent, and shoots the robot in anger, no big loss and an officers life is saved.
Take the example of cameras used to track vehicles and people - so many in the UK. They can be used for used for good or bad purposes - or both. In the murder of Sarah Everard, they provided concise and immediate data to identify her murderer, who was a police officer. One can imagine a different society where that information was hidden from the public so the police force could avoid a scandal. But that's not what happened in our present reality.
until I read the letter. Now, I can see robots patrolling my compound 24x7 (as all we USAians have compounds) armed with twin drum-fed AK47s (as we also have tons of excess firearms just laying about) mounted to each arm. And, they'll be programmed to deal with the neighbor's schnauzer the next time it lifts a leg on my petunias!
Foster-Miller doesn't seem to be a signatory and their lineup is principally robots for warfare/military.
There are a whole bunch of military applications that don't involve firing a weapon at the enemy. They can sweep for IED's. Plant IED's, mines and move munitions to forward positions. They can move to strategic locations and provide surveillance, comms relays and act as a differential GPS points for precision guided munition delivery. The list goes on and on. I can envision a robot dog that has a detector to navigate a mine field and work it's way into the middle where it can sit in a protected position and do a job using the enemy's mines that they know are planted in that field so aren't going to close in to destroy the robot and the robot can have mapped out a way to make a rapid retreat if needed.
They don't want to stop their robots from being weaponized.
They simply want to appear want to stop their robots from being weaponized. It's business-as-usual. Does anyone seriously think a "policy" which states, "you may not arm our robots" will be worth a tinker's damn?
A more-accurate official statement would be, "We do not sell weaponized robots. Cough (but we do sell our robots to OEMs, who arm them and resell them to military and police organizations. And business is booming!) cough."
The only thing that's preventing them from being weaponized is that nobody quite knows the optimum shape or mounting for a weapon. Yet.
Every other technology has been weaponized. This will be, too. Boston Dynamics might be sad but their shareholders won't be.
The future is already here:-
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/israel-pilots-robotic-machine-gun-at-west-bank-checkpoint/ar-AA12fWgG
So lets say the integrity of those robots stays intact. No harm done in sending them to some place, right ?
But what about a completely independant payload strapped to their chassis ? Something like a bomb, a nerve gas dispenser, anything incindiery that can be triggered without the robots hardware being connected to it ?
Add any trigger you want to that payload weapon, be it facial precognition or other insecure measures, be it GPS/location triggers, the traditional time bomb, temperature or motion detection triggers or a mix of everything able to pull the pin.
I believe its pretty much impossible to avoid such scenarios, that is if anyone (including the robot corporations) cares at all.
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