Killing Robot Being Tested by Lockheed Martin

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/12/killing_robot_b.html

by saikat • 18 years ago

20 42 18 years ago

srn• 18 years ago

How is this a robot any more than any other missile? Not to say they aren't cool... but if I could mod this down I would for being misleading.

Sam_Odio• 18 years ago

Agreed. After watching the video I also find the "killer robot" title misleading.

Also, why not link to the original? The linked blog post adds little value. http://www.thirdeyeconcept.com/news/index.php?page=336

whalesalad• 18 years ago

I'm with you here as well. It's essentially a glorified version of the missiles that we currently use to shoot enemy missiles out of the sky. This is where all of the government Military contractors are headed, autonomous packs of weapons that hunt together and act as one mind to destroy something. My dad worked at Lockheed for 20 years and has since moved on to Northrop where they have some pretty crazy pack-hunting autonomous helicopters that look pretty fearsome. That's the kind of stuff I might worry about, but something up in outer space shooting down an enemy rocket doesn't really concern me as potentially dangerous... at least not any more dangerous than shit the Military already has :)

uuilly• 18 years ago

A cruise missile is a controlled. The future "robots" will be autonomous. There are plenty of UAV's (unmanned aerial vehicle) used in different theaters but very few (public) UAAV's (unmanned autonomous aerial vehicle.) A UAV has a pilot at a ground station in Florida, a UAAV has none. It is given a mission and it has objectives with priorities and, if it faces resistance or bad weather it thinks for itself.

The "killer robot" headline is silly. The interesting trend is that autonomous weapons systems are operating with fewer and fewer men in the loop.

StrawberryFrog• 18 years ago

You say "trend ... fewer and fewer men in the loop." and I say "smooth transition to robots".

RobertL• 18 years ago

Wow. Just in time. I think the Greek Government needs a couple dozen of these things and it needs them right now.

nickb• 18 years ago

Obey the first law, please!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

ASUmusicMAN• 18 years ago

Although Schneier mentions the need of discussing the rules in his post, the whole "killer robots" already has me losing hope for following rule one.

icey• 18 years ago

We live in a capitalist society where a sizable portion of our GDP is derived from defense spending. I'm afraid the rules were doomed from the start.

jcl2• 18 years ago

It's funny that, having invented the Three Laws, Asimov wrote so many stories showing how easy they are to circumvent.

iamwil• 18 years ago

All the thrusters are in a circular plane around the KV. How does it balance itself front to back when its thrusters are all in a 2D plane?

a-priori• 18 years ago

My guess is it either has thrusters on an angle to the plane that we're not seeing, or it has an internal gyroscope.

DanielBMarkham2• 18 years ago

Misleading title. This is an anti-anti-missile system, not a killer robot.

Geesh. I was expecting the terminator and I got Star Wars.

markessien7• 18 years ago

You know, this would be a good thing. Imagine that countries had robots that where so overwhelming in force, agility and firepower, that no army could resist them. No combination of tanks and airplanes could defeat such a fleet of robots.

In that case, there is no need to kill the civilians any longer. If two technologically advanced nations battle each other, and the robot fleet of one of the nations is destroyed, the battle is lost. Still fighting would be pointless, because you lose people, and the other guy does not even lose machines.

So we'd just have a huge robot battle in the desert that we could watch on TV, and when our country lost, we'd resign ourselves to the invading force and just give up (or run).

I guess the strategy then would be to wait till the human military administrators come in, and then start a low level insurgency.

jcl2• 18 years ago

...which reminds me of a line from R.J. Gatling:

"It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jordan_Gatling

markessien7• 18 years ago

Well, he was right. Imagine the invasion of Iraq with swords and men on horses. You would need millions and the deaths would have been in hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Guns end wars quicker.

helveticaman• 18 years ago

I think slavery might be making a comeback sixty or so years from now. And I mean large-scale slavery, unlike the 26 million slaves there are now. I mean slavery in the billions. Robots might make it very easy.

markessien7• 18 years ago

I'm not sure what you're saying. Robots will enslave humans, humans will use robots to enslave other humans, or robots will become our slaves?

raleec• 18 years ago

Very slippery slope. If overt warfare becomes obsolete, civilians might be the only targets.

ComputerGuru• 18 years ago

This reminds me of a killing robot developed for the Israeli Military and completed last year:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/viper-the-israeli-murder-machi...

ivankirigin3• 18 years ago

If you bring up terminator when talking about today's robots, you don't know anything about robotics.

Cluster bombs, landmines, nukes, etc. are all much better kill-bots.

The ethics are also trivial: killing civilians is bad. Torture is bad. Killing armed combatants is ok.

Robots are going to be _more_ ethical, because operators won't react instinctively but logically. No one wants to kill civilians. A robot entering a house in Fallujah will be less trigger happy.

I find myself writing this comment every few weeks. People don't know anything about robotics.

thomasmallen3• 18 years ago

If people can hack computers, people will be able to hack robots (should they be able in any way to respond to commands, which they'd better). This is a frightening prospect.

ivankirigin3• 18 years ago

You can hack a gun pretty easily. You point it at someone and pull the trigger.

There is nothing different really. They will be weapons, just like today's weapons.

There are certainly security issues. That isn't unique to robots though. The "robots will kill you" mindset really isn't useful.

thomasmallen3• 18 years ago

I can't believe my tax dollars go towards this shit.

Killing Robot Being Tested by Lockheed Martin

Related Stories