DARPA « Dr Alf's Blog

Sergeant Jason Mero describes the capabilities of the Special Weapons Observation Remote Direct-Action System at the Washington Auto Show. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)





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Dr Alf brings us an article from the Japan Times, which ponders the question of the ethics of robots being used to kill people.

The implication seems to be that robots will dispatch people without human involvement, and since they are machines nobody can be held accountable. This, at the moment, does not apply because robots are made by humans are controlled by humans, and lack sufficient artificial intelligence to make decisions on their own.

Since the Opium Wars, in which 100 million people died, we have had: 50 million dead from World War; 2,50 million killed in India when Pakistan broke away, largely due to religious infighting, which Lord Mountbatten did little to stop; 66 million killed in the Gulags by Stalin; 10 million Congolese killed by King Leopold of Belgium; the Holocaust which killed 6 million Jews, 1 million gypsies and another 1 million assorted people; the Armenian genocide by Turkey, in which 3 million died,; Rwanda and Cambodia in which a total of 4 million died; plus, of course, the 70 million Chinese dispatched by Chairman Mao the so called “Great Helmsman”. Each of these events were financed and instigated by a small group of people, often based on events which never happened, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which became the trigger for the Vietnam War, which for the Americans officially lasted from 1963 to 1976, and in which 1 million people died, 225,000 North Vietnamese were missing in action, 58,000 American soldiers perished and 2,100 ended up missing in action.

In every one of these wars, no robots were used, so with or without them, we clearly have a predisposition towards violence.

The next phase, before the widespread disposition of fighting and storming robots is perhaps the ekoskeleton and the Pentagon’s dream of a liquid metal “Ironman” suit similar to the one depicted in the film of the same name. That still relies on a human but a human with capabilities not available to a normal human.Robots and the Skynet system of automated nuclear warfare, as depicted in the second Terminator film, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, do pose a problem because to make them accountable you would need an override system. The Pentagon allegedly has plans to launch a real live version of Skynet but naturally has not said when or what manual override system they envisage.

The public in the West want to be protected but are not prepared to pay higher taxes for defense, and are too squeamish to demand really robust action against terrorism. Here robots could perhaps be used to provide “boots on the ground”, and thus save the lives of our young fighting men and woman, whilst efficiently and relentlessly dealing with the escalating threats.

Similarly, with drones, other threats to our way of life can be dealt with in areas, where other methods would cause collateral damage.

Thus for me, there is a sound financial and practical case for using robots to remove dangerous threats to our way of life, wherever they may exist.

Open this link for graphical examples of the latest robots

John Gelmini

President Obama is good at making speeches talking about “defining issues” and failing to deliver on his promises.

Dr Alf has already said as much in more measured words than I would tend to use but the issue of widening inequality has arisen from a series of deliberate acts including the banking crisis which have been designed to remove money and assets from 99.9% of the population and transfer them to the tiny plutocracy that remains.

President Obama, those that put him into power, and the heads of Europe and the UK, have all connived to make this happen and to conceal from the vast mass of their respective people what has been done and what is still going on (the process has not stopped and is going to get much worse).

What none of these leaders or the heads of big business will talk about is the rate of job destruction through computerization, robotics(Google has just purchased Boston Dynamics which makes fighting robots for the Pentagon and DARPA), AI call center software, expert systems, speech recognition, automation and the elimination of

Barack Obama, President, talked with David Cameron, Prime Minister, and Angela Merkel, Chancellor, at the 36th G8 summit in Muskoka District Municipality, Ontario Province on June 25, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

blue-collar manufacturing processes.

The pace of this is so fast that even efficiently run Governments and good education systems cannot keep up which leads us to the problem of what to do with the economically impoverished who are now rendered economically useless and what to do about the next generation of young people (the so called Millennials).

So far 2 years worth of Millennials have been largely sidelined and now we have David Cameron talking about the benefits of “volunteering”.

Young people eventually become older people who marry, form relationships, have children and buy houses.

Without money, they cannot do this yet Cameron, Obama and our tired European elite act as if these problems did not exist.

Currently, a “lot of frogs are being boiled” but no-one is prepared to say so or that without changes in policy inequality will widen to the point that Bertrand Russell, a member of the Committee of 300 wrote about and dreamed of, which was that the poor and disenfranchised would become a separate species.

John Gelmini