The age of robotic warfare has begun

by
in robotics on (#3M5)
It's not the Terminator , but it's a start. Military robots are here, and they're taking an increasingly important role in modern warfare . The folks at Vox write:
The armed robots issue is becoming so real, so fast, that 87 countries sat down at a United Nations-convened conference from May 13th to the 15th to discuss banning the things. Those nations, including Russia, China, and the United States, discussed amending the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which 117 countries have accepted, to prohibit the use of armed robots during wartime. A lot of the news coverage on this issue has treated robot arms control as if it's a joke or a novelty. It's neither: For over a year, Human Rights Watch has been building a campaign to pressure for banning military robots, arguing that they pose an unacceptable threat to civilian populations. Are they right? Should we be banning what HRW calls "killer robots"?
What's your opinion? Crawl out of your underground bunker/weapons cache and let your fellow Pipeheads hear you. But do it quietly: the future robots can hear you .

Re: The problem with robots... (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-05-19 13:24 (#1QP)

I agree. It depersonalizes the costs of waging war - makes it into a video game, and a damned expensive one, at that. There was a good article making the rounds at Reddit not long ago where they are trying to personalize it by making a huge picture visible to a drone 'pilot' of some kid who got killed by another drone - make the pilot really think about it.

That said, since I've got kids, I'm glad the robots can go kill each other now. Leave my kids at home, thankyouverymuch.
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