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Category Archives: war

Tiny robots could fly around no-kill rules

03 May

robo-flyA pair of intriguing-and-potentially-linked robot stories made the news this week, with the first being a United Nations report calling on a moratorium for automated killing machines. The report for the UN Human Rights Commission suggests a worldwide ban on the production, assembly, testing and deployment of fully or semi-autonomous weapons until rules can be developed to govern their use.

With United States, Britain, Israel, South Korea and Japan already having such killer robots, the clock is ticking. Removing humans from the decision to institute killing, the report says, could lead to an increase of it.

“Decisions over life and death in armed conflict may require compassion and intuition. Humans — while they are fallible — at least might possess these qualities, whereas robots definitely do not,” it says. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on May 3, 2013 in robots, war, weapons

 

Robots will identify targets better than humans

13 Dec

terminatorA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how the case for laws governing armed robots is growing. The post was in response to a report issued by Human Rights Watch, which advocated for an outright ban on autonomous armed machines before they become a reality.

I argued that an outright ban was impractical and perhaps undesirable, with different countries having different needs. Some very much want to take human soldiers out of harm’s way while others might be looking at armed robots as a way of evening the odds against vastly bigger enemies.

One of the things that stood out for me in regards to the report were the claims that robots won’t be able to differentiate between an armed soldier and an innocent girl holding an ice cream cone. I suggested that the technology to do exactly that is developing quickly, so it won’t be long before it’s actually put to use.

A few commentators over at the Lawfare blog, however, took it a step further by suggesting that not only will robots be able to identify hostile targets over innocents, they’ll actually do it better than humans. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on December 13, 2012 in robots, war

 

Case for armed robot laws is mounting

21 Nov

Israel’s unmanned armed Guardium vehicle still has a human in the loop, for now.

Human Rights Watch has released a new report that is pretty much self-explanatory: Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots. In it, the advocacy group argues for a ban on fully autonomous, armed machines, in fear that their development will ultimately result in a Terminator-like situation where robots end up killing innocent humans.

The group believes such machines are only a few decades away, according to a statement:

Fully autonomous weapons do not yet exist, and major powers, including the United States, have not made a decision to deploy them. But high-tech militaries are developing or have already deployed precursors that illustrate the push toward greater autonomy for machines on the battlefield. The United States is a leader in this technological development. Several other countries – including China, Germany, Israel, South Korea, Russia, and the United Kingdom – have also been involved. Many experts predict that full autonomy for weapons could be achieved in 20 to 30 years, and some think even sooner.

As per that last part, the group’s estimate is probably way off with full autonomy likely to come much sooner. Armed flying drones have been taking to the skies in Afghanistan and Iraq for the better part of a decade, while Israel is currently using armed ground robots such as the Guardium, likely in its current conflict in Gaza. In each case, there’s a human operator in the loop, but that’s likely to change soon. Read the rest of this entry »

 
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Posted by on November 21, 2012 in israel, robots, u.s., uav, war

 

Israel, war technology and the future of a world

15 Oct

If the Middle East were peaceful, would we have Kinect?

A few months ago, the Centre for Israeli and Jewish Affairs here in Toronto contacted me to ask if I would be interested in being part of a journalist delegation to Israel, to tour the country’s technology sector. I’ve had my eye on Israel for several years now, since working on Sex, Bombs and Burgers and learning that much of the country’s economic success over the past few decades has been the result of a meshing between technology and the military. So of course, I agreed.

A group of us are spending this week visiting tech schools, organizations, entrepreneurs and companies around Israel, from the research and development labs of large multinationals such as Intel and Motorola to smaller startups such as Mobli and Conduit. I’ll be sure to write up some of my experiences, this week if I have the time, or next week at the latest.

The numbers on Israel’s technology sector are impressive. Israel has more venture capital investments per capita than any nation on earth, including the United States, and boasts the most non-U.S. companies listed on the Nasdaq after China. It’s ranked fourth in the world in scientific activity, in terms of scientific publications per million citizens, and has some of the highest levels of R&D investment globally. Indeed, Intel and Microsoft opened their first non-U.S. R&D centres in the country.

On the military side, Israel is third in the world in terms of per capita spending, behind only the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. Looking to future tech, it is the second biggest spender on military robots, such as unmanned aerial and ground robots, after the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

 
3 Comments

Posted by on October 15, 2012 in israel, war

 

Military robots about to go fully robotic

14 Aug

While the past decade has seen the proliferation of semi-autonomous military robots such as the Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle and the PackBot bomb disposer, there’s always been a human in the loop. That’s about to change, as military robots are about to take their next big step – into full autonomy.

Check out the video below of the Ground Unmanned Support Surrogate, or GUSS, being developed by TORC Robotics of Blacksburg, Va. GUSS can be remotely piloted by a human, but it can also be programmed to navigate autonomously to waypoints or even to follow other vehicles or individuals. The vehicle is intended to act as a load-carrying mule, or as a sort of evac medic (although if it’s going to be used that way, the marines may want to remove the gas tanks hanging off its side in the video):

Stars and Stripes has a full story on this impending switch, which will inevitably have an effect on the larger consumer world. Just as the Parrot AR drone toy followed similar military robots by only a few years, so too will GUSS and its ilk translate into the real world.

Google, which is working on fully automated cars, believes such vehicles will be commonplace within the decade. While such a premise will inevitably cue the raft of Terminator apocalypse comments, I for one welcome the chance to ditch my own car and order one up to my door via smartphone whenever I need it.

 
1 Comment

Posted by on August 14, 2012 in army, artificial intelligence, robots, war

 
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