Imagine; you have trained for years to be all you can be. You have undergone humiliation, education, hardening and risen to the top to become The Best Of The Best. You willingly send your men into battle to die for their country.

But when Mark Tilden sends *his* agent into battle, even for a test, you Just. Can’t Watch.

Ladies and Gennlmen, it’s in print, therefore it must be true, those generals have a soft spot for Bots On The Ground:

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become an unprecedented field study in human relationships with intelligent machines. These conflicts are the first in history to see widespread deployment of thousands of battle bots. Flying bots range in size from Learjets to eagles. Some ground bots are like small tanks. Others are the size of two-pound dumbbells, designed to be thrown through a window to scope out the inside of a room. Bots search caves for bad guys, clear roads of improvised explosive devices, scoot under cars to look for bombs, spy on the enemy and, sometimes, kill humans.

Even more startling than these machines’ capabilities, however, are the effects they have on their friendly keepers who, for example, award their bots “battlefield promotions” and “purple hearts.” “Ours was called Sgt. Talon,” says Sgt. Michael Maxson of the 737th Ordnance Company (EOD). “We always wanted him as our main robot. Every time he was working, nothing bad ever happened. He always got the job done. He took a couple of detonations in front of his face and didn’t stop working. One time, he actually did break down in a mission, and we sent another robot in and it got blown to pieces. It’s like he shut down because he knew something bad would happen.” The troops promoted the robot to staff sergeant — a high honor, since that usually means a squad leader. They also awarded it three “purple hearts.”

The article goes on to expand the ways in which people become attached to their machines, name-checking Rodney Brooks and Cynthia Breazeal in the process.

We here at SB think it’s completely silly to humanize a robot, because they are after all just lumps of batteries and machinery. Even when SB apologizes to R2D2 for doing something painful (”That glue’ll set in a minute, little guy. . .”) or Mr. Robotics gives a robot a talking-to for its own good, we clearly keep in mind that they are merely tools, extensions of human ingenuity and not endowed with any spearate intellect or personality. Yah.

Folks in the article disagree:

“Every robot has its own little quirks. You sort of get used to them. Sometimes you get a robot that comes in and it does a little dance, or a karate chop, instead of doing what it’s supposed to do.” The operators “talk about them a lot, about the robot doing its mission and getting everything accomplished.” He remembers the time “one of the robots happened to get its tracks destroyed while doing a mission.” The operators “duct-taped them back on, finished the mission and then brought the robot back” to a hero’s welcome.

As any roboticist will tell you, sometimes, the machines just do stuff, and no one knows why. Personality? Who knows? All we know is that we still find ourselves talking to our charges when we are alone, late at night, in the workshop.

It’s when they start talking back that it gets a little unnerving.

[Thanks Alexander Rose!]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.