Robots Don’t Kill People, Mechanized Autonomous Death Machines Do
February 8th, 2007 by SBAs a follow-up to the Photo Of The Day yesterday, the ever-prescient Magnus over at Shifz Blog mentions a situation that looks wholly sensible on the surface but goes completely WTF when one thinks about it:
Suicidebots blog made me aware of a Richard Vaughan’s initiative “No Evil Robots” - which basically sounds like a good thing, as the point seems to be to stand up against military-funded development of autonomous killer-appliances … But somehow, I think the slogan “Prevent evil robots from taking over the world:
Just say no to robot weapons and violent robot competitions.” goes a little bit too far.
Just for the record, we here at Suicidebots wholly agree with the whole “No autonomous killer robots roaming the streets and killing children and puppies” thing, of course. We’ve blogged about it here and here and here.
But we do agree with Magnus (especially after the post below) that hot robot on robot action is way more fulfilling than watching a couple of brutish overmuscled guys spit each other’s teeth out on the Spike channel or something.
The idea and sincere development of autonomous war robots do send shivers of Skynet-inspired dread up our collective spine, and we *should* inspire scientists to use their powers for good and not evil, but please Perfesser Vaughan, let us have our violent robot competitions.
Violent Robot Competitions never hurt anybody.
It’s the non-violent ones we have to worry about.
I have a niggling feeling that DARPA is probably not going to use those Grand Challenge Prizewinning Technologies for helping Gramma cross the street.
Likewise, it might be true that Singapore is planning on using their civilian-engineer-developed robot army to distribute carnations down the imaginary invasion forces’ rifle barrels, but I doubt it.
Combat robotics is like boxing, only with all of the action and none of the blood. It’s all the really good bits of NASCAR strung together in eight minute intervals.
It’s eight-year-old girls begging their dads for Lego Mindstorms and Boe-Bot kits.
It’s copies of Make and Craft magazine flying off the demo tables when the adults and kids in the audience realize that those machines in there were made by people just like them.
It’s all down-home garage engineering and participation in a sport for the non-athletic. The muscles you need are in your skull, and the only endurance you need is the willingness to deal with failure over and over and over again until you get that perfect winning robot.
Besides, combat robots are so highly specialized for the arena that they really don’t serve as much of an inspiration for a military surgical strike team. 340lb Internal combustion powered spinners tend not to be very discriminating when you fire ‘em up in the battlefield.
We’ll get down off that soapbox now (do you hear someone humming The Battle Hymn Of The Republic over here somewhere?), but we’ll just wrap up by saying there are a lot of uses for robots, good and evil, but sometimes something that only looks violent can end up being the very thing inspiring the young scientists of the world to create and develop the good.
February 8th, 2007 at 6:16 pm
Hear hear! I wholeheartedly agree with you. You have phrased this very well too.
Vaughan goes over the line in his desire to smother the fun side of our fascination with violence and competition. There is an arrogance there in that he assumes we don’t know the difference in having a good time with RC-controlled weedeaters and mechanized infanticide.
Hell, if people don’t get their smashy-bashy ya-yas out they’re more likely to do far worse things in their basements or under the cover of darkness in a foreign land.
But I’m just repeating what you guys already said. And I’m not doing as good a job of it.
Anyway, Bravo and chin-chin and all that.