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Recruiting Robots for Combat
#1
Recruiting Robots for Combat

November 28th, 2010 Via: New York Times:
The Maars robots first attracted the military’s interest as a defensive system during an Army Ranger exercise here in 2008. Used as a nighttime sentry against infiltrators equipped with thermal imaging vision systems, the battery-powered Maars unit remained invisible — it did not have the heat signature of a human being — and could “shoot” intruders with a laser tag gun without being detected itself, said Bob Quinn, a vice president at QinetiQ.
Maars is the descendant of an earlier experimental system built by QinetiQ. Three armed prototypes were sent to Iraq and created a brief controversy after they pointed a weapon inappropriately because of a software bug.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
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#2
Dr. Strangelove Redux

NOVEMBER 29, 2010
NEW YORK — And now a quote that could come from Dr. Strangelove:
"A lot of people fear artificial intelligence. I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force."
That is from John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. "Dr. Arquilla," reports The New York Times, "argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans."
Aren't we lucky that software never makes mistakes?
Dr. Arquilla, a Stanford product and a true patriot, I'm sure, is one of the most dangerous men in the world. And there are many more like him. He is one of the best and the brightest who think they are advancing science and are in the business of reducing the pain of war by substituting robots and other electronic killers for actual human beings. Their philosophy is that machines don't get angry like soldiers do, so they make better decisions than actual men and women on the ground. Their goal is to make starting wars more easy than, say, the Constitution of the United States intended.
Of course, in Afghanistan, which the new Dr. Strangeloves are using as a laboratory, they have no more idea of how to end a war than Pee-Wee Herman. Their tools are Predators, robotic tanks the size of those riding lawnmowers, even smaller tanks to search for mines, and all sorts of humanless transport and reconnaissance vehicles.
Great stuff. They can kill people from thousands of miles away. And they are in the forefront of the new American way of making war. We have evolved from a nation of laws (the Constitution) where the representatives of all men and women are required to declare war as a matter of national consensus, a thing we last did during World War II, to a nation with a volunteer army, which barely disturbs the surface life of ordinary Americans whose children have not enlisted, dealing death by faraway technology.
The new Dr. Strangeloves are trying to revolutionize and, in a way, sanitize warfare. Why should the public, the masses, be bothered with unpleasantness when we can zap the bad guys from afar? Of course, there is the fact that those unfriendlies have a knack for getting at us with fairly primitive technology like cars or vests that go boom!
Again, as Dr. Arquilla told John Markoff, a technology reporter for The Times: "Some of us think that the right organizational structure for the future is one that skillfully blends humans and intelligent machines. We think that's the key to the mastery of 21st-century military affairs."
And some of us think you, Dr. Arquilla, are a nutcase, figuring out a way to fight more and more wars in the 21st century. Wouldn't that be nice, especially if it mobilized fewer and fewer humans and more and more machines?
To make that point: Our Congress, robots themselves, many of them, in 2001 ordered the Defense Department to try to make one-third of United States combat vehicles robotic, that is, with no humans on board. As Dr. Arquilla said, human intelligence and judgment is second-rate from the get-go.
The idea of all this is to make war into a video game with a difference. That is the players will be virtual and the casualties will be real. Dr. Strangelove would have loved it.


http://www.richardreeves.com/latest_column.html
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
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#3
Quote:"A lot of people fear artificial intelligence. I will stand my artificial intelligence against your human any day of the week and tell you that my A.I. will pay more attention to the rules of engagement and create fewer ethical lapses than a human force."
That is from John Arquilla, executive director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School. "Dr. Arquilla," reports The New York Times, "argues that weapons systems controlled by software will not act out of anger and malice and, in certain cases, can already make better decisions on the battlefield than humans."

Yup - I can imagine the software programme here, just like the drones: "Our intelligence is infallible. These ragheads are bad. Exterminate."

Of course when Dr Strangelove's AI exterminates innocent men, women and children, I'm sure Arquilla will blame the intelligence.

Not his sacred and infallible robots.

Of course, the military love robots because they'll always obey orders, and will never suffer human doubt, musing: "you know what, that order sucks and I'm not doing it. I'm not going to exterminate everyone in that village in order to save it."

And no robot could ever write:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
"It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted...."
"Proverbs for Paranoids 4: You hide, They seek."
"They are in Love. Fuck the War."

Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

"Ccollanan Pachacamac ricuy auccacunac yahuarniy hichascancuta."
The last words of the last Inka, Tupac Amaru, led to the gallows by men of god & dogs of war
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#4
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:I'm not going to exterminate everyone in that village in order to save it."

For freedom and democracy...
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
Carl Jung - Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
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