The age of the terminators

Chimps are hunting with spears, calves are becoming meat-eaters, squirrels are attacking people in parks, killer robots will be engaging in independent combat…..I tell you, it’s getting spooky out there.

I’m reminded of the Star Trek episode in which warfare had been reduced to mathematical calculation, the “would have been” targets simply being ordered into termination chambers, so as not to disturb property or business. War became so comfortable (for the survivors) that no one had any incentive to end it. Kirk, of course, destroyed the calculator.

Those killer robots are already among us. 50,000 people a year fall to their deadly rampage. Two tons of advanced electronics and armor infrastructure capable of reaching speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour (160 kph). They have been deployed into all parts of the world. And they’ve been very very busy.

Seriously, just wait until these machines get AI to protect themselves from other nasty machines and humans out to harm it.

It won’t be too long before these machines will be so powerful that nothing will be able to defeat them. OK, it might be a several decades but it is likely to happen in your grandkid’s lifetimes.

Sorry to be so pessimistic but these machines are destined to take over the world and we, all humans, will just get in their way.

I wouldn’t worry about machines taking over just yet. When the day comes when someone designs machines that can repair themselves then I’m digging a deep bomb shelter and not coming out. It’s not just being self aware, but also self perpetuating. What good is taking over the world if you drop dead after a circuit board fails?

I’m sure there are plenty of self deluded Risk players who dream of a robot army that will do their bidding. Problem for most of those fools is that a robot army is as only as good as the leader running them. And considering how fucked up OIF has been, well, I doubt a robot army would have handled Iraq any better.

Will it (or an army of it) reduce human casualties in war? Maybe.

somehow I doubt it will reduce collateral damage. given the reality of insurgencies, how could a robot possibly distinguish between an insurgent and a civilian? this is truly frightening.

have you ever seen that great early 80s network TV movie, “demolition alley?

when i saw the picture of that new weapon concept this morning, that was one of the first images that popped into my sci-fi influenced brain.

from an aesthetic perspective, it looks really neat & seems to have brought forward some fascinating design developments.

LOL. Look at the picture with the Reuters article before making too much of it. This thing is a gun mounted on two triangular treadmills. The company claims it can go up stairs and over rubble, but if that picture is at all accurate, it would be pretty slow and even slightly rugged terrain would require hovercraft technology. This thing isn’t a Cylon or a Terminator, it’s a landmine with a profit margin.

Come to think of it, this looks like a good metaphor of the whole “asymmetrical warfare” problem. Well, maybe “metaphor” isn’t the right word… distilled example, maybe. It’s makes dehumanizing our enemies easier for us and downright mandatory for them. Its name is something fit for a comic book, and/or a clever acronym. Ideally, you’d send one of these against dozens of enemy humans at once, wipe them out, and lose a piece of hardware if anything at all.

But more realistically, we’ll send three of them down a street into urban warfare, blow away the stupid teenage cousins of our actual enemies, and hope the bad guys don’t have weapons as advanced as a plow truck. It damn sure won’t be negotiating, accepting the surrender of opponents, or patrolling streets in the “winning the peace” stage of things. And to escape it, all the freedom fighters insurgents terrorists have to do is close the damn door behind them.