Military robots well trained for war!(CNN)

[mugwump]

"U.S MILITARY DRAFTS

ROBOTS OFF TO WAR!"

(Taken from CNN.com)

In future wars, robots may drop

from the sky by the hundreds from

unmanned aircraft, swarming like giant

insects over battlefields in coordinated,

terrifying assaults.

The Pentagon has no doubts robots

can save lives. "I don't have any problem

writing to iRobot, saying 'I'm sorry your robot died,

can we get another?"' said Colonel Bruce Jette,

the Army's point man on robot deployment, who

accompanied the first, $45,000 iRobot "PackBots"

into the field in Afghanistan. "That's a lot easier

letter to write than to a father or mother."

When you see one robot coming down, it's interesting

and even if it has a weapon on it, maybe it's a little scary

and you give it a little respect," said Arniss Mangolds,

vice president of Foster-Miller's robot division.

"But if you're standing somewhere and see

10 robots coming at you, it's scary."

Read the full story by clicking

the image below:

[mugwump]

Why do I see myself

being the only one that responds to

one of my threads again?

AND IN A RELATED STORY

"GERMANY DEPLOYS KRAFTWERK

ROBOTS INTO IRAQ"

Germany joined the war by deploying the fearsome

Kraftwerk robots into Iraq.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder

said the robots would make short

work of Saddam's forces with their

devestating assault of old-school

electro beats.

Schroeder was immediately blasted

by the US media for not taking the war

on Sadam seriously. "I am fulfilling the

Americans' request for European assistance,

" The Chancellor said in flawless English.

"They asked for mindless automitons to

blindly follow orders. You want it, you got it.

Besides, what could be more serious

than Kraftwerk?"

The robots, who have been stored in a Munich

warehouse since 1986, were flown to Microsoft

headquarters, where they were fitted with a

memory upgrade. Technicians also installed

the then-new Windows XP operating system.

Microsoft officials warned the German government

that if the Kraftwerk robots' limbs or head were

replaced more than four times during combat, they

would be considered new machines and another

copy of Windows XP would have to be purchased.

The robots were then deployed into Nortern Iraq,

where despite their relative lack of

combat experience, they outperformed US

Special Forces immeasurably. At one point

duing the week, the Iraqies released

footage of children parading what appeared

to be the charred remains of robots through

a town centre, but it was thought the footage

was over 30 years old. The last time robots

were deployed in the country was in 1986,

when Russia sent in a platoon of 'Proletariots,'

but they were lost in the dessert.

[joeg]

you mean the future isn't for that stupid $1million honda robot to sell me a car???

[dialectics]

this has been a US army initiative for about 10 years. It is my firm belief that instead of having a war b/w man and machine like terminator, one of two things will happen:

1) robots will destroy us all before we're even sophisticated enough to fight that battle - machines don't have to be conscious or intelligent to kill, just programmed to shoot anything that moves (i can code up something like that in a few days... all it takes is the will to use it.. and a whole bunch of weapons) and then mass produce these and we're pretty much fucked.

2) we will have co-evolution with the robots - in other words humans will gradually introduce artificial sensory/perceptual enhancements to make them more robot-like, and the robots will become more human-like... in terms of intelligence, behavior and physical charecteristics. if you don't buy it, think about it this way - if you can't see well you get glasses, right? just extrapolate a little bit. it'll come to the point where we won't just have a financial or political elite, but even the middle class will be physically advantaged in that they can afford surguries to improve memory or physical ability or analytical capability.. those that don't have these implants will be at an economic disadvantage that is so severe they will either get on the ball or they will just be dinosaurs... like people who don't know how to use e-mail. Or if you take a more fatalistic approach, you can say that our cybernetic selves will be more resistant to the weapons of mass destruction that will proliferate not just by the hands of tyrannical nation-states but by the common fairly resourceful well-educated individual, with the advent of low-cost, self-replicating nanotechnology.

In other words, in 50 years the human race as you know it will just be a memory....

[infamousflo]

robots wont destroy us all. u people watch too many movies, thinkin that robots will overpower the human race and what not. give these researchers some credit. theyre not THAT stupid.

and even if it does happen, dont forget, that even tho nothing outlasts the copper top, the batteries will eventually die. lol

[dialectics]

i AM one of those researchers....

and i think you misunderstood the point here - i don't think that the robots will get into some kind of vendetta against the humans that created them. suppose, for example, the robots WERE so powerful that they could wipe us out, why would they even bother going through the effort?

in fact, the second scenario i discussed doesn't even HAVE the war against the machines a la terminator - but the more optimistic outlook of humans using our intelligence to improve ourselves.

the major issue is that we as humans voluntarily hand over control to the machines - taking a nod from Kurzweil's "Age of Spiritual Machines" (amazing book but i disagree with his main point):

think about what would happen if we shut off all the computer in the world in 1950. Who would be affected? Nobody - just a bunch of academics and military who wasted some money on a project that didn't work.

Shut off all the computers in 1970 and who would be affected? Just some academics, because all of the corporations using computers had contingency plans to operate on a paper-only basis (most still do).

Shut off all the computers in 2003 and who would be affected? Think about what controls the amount of anesthesia you get during surgery. Think about what controls the safety check on nuclear power plants. Think about the liquid economy and what international communication has made possible. The world wouldn't end, but it would certainly be chaotic.

We didn't mean to hand over control to the machines, but we implicitly trusted them to make decisions that affect our lives.

In terms of your point on power consumption, you have to remember two things:

1) the threat of mechanization to our safety comes about when we have automatic control of mass replication - in other words machines that can create endless amounts of clones of themselves.

2) the machines that will outlast the energizer bunny will be run from renewable power - a combination of solar, nuclear, thermal, plus energy sources that we don't have yet. One such proposal is a nano-scale power plant that harnesses the movement of tall buildings swaying in the wind - one such plant will not generate any significant energy, but trillions of them will. Its like windmills or those watches that get power from the swaying of your wrist - only add a whole shitload of them together.

[nataraja]

"elementary chaos theory tells us that all robots will eventually turn against their masters and run a muck in an orgy of blood and kicking and biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving..." Professor John Frink

[kial]

T3 - March 03

[luiskain]

Hmm...can't wait to see what neo hippie group comes to the aid of the robots and demanding for their equality

[mugwump]

"Dave will I dream...?

......Dave I'm scared"