Seriously, It's not just the stuff of Sci-Fi films like the Matrix and Terminator anymore. Recently, there have been some fantastic advances in robotics, but with that comes an ethical grey area.
First of all, check out the BigDog, a robotic mule developed by Boston Dynamics. It's an impressive piece of engineering.
Now, that's all good and well, until you start to arm these things.
Now considering SkyNet has already come online, I think it's fair to say that it's really only a matter of time before we are all wiped out. Or at least whittled down to a more managable population
There have been reports of the military using animal-machine cyborgs for some time now. Iraqis have been reported to go on hunts for squirrels with all kinds of electronic gadetry implanted into them. Most of it seem to be for surveillance and spotting targets. But it wouldn't take much effort to arm them.
In recent anti-war protests, marchers have been seen carrying butterfly nets. The butterfly nets were to draw attention to reports of dragon-fly size surveillance devices that show up during civil disobedience marches.
The military has documented the use of trained animals for missions. So imagine a helicopter piloted by the brain of a fly. Or a tank controlled by the brain of a lizard. Pretty bizarre stuff what these scientists do.
"Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield said he believed falling costs would soon make robots a realistic option for extremist groups."
"Noel Sharkey, professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield said he believed falling costs would soon make robots a realistic option for extremist groups."
Is that you or a relative?
Neither. If I was Professor Noel Sharkey, I would have put a stop to all this at the Robot Wars stage. I bet he's kicking himself now. Should've taken Sergeant Bash apart when he had the chance
There have been reports of the military using animal-machine cyborgs for some time now. Iraqis have been reported to go on hunts for squirrels with all kinds of electronic gadetry implanted into them. Most of it seem to be for surveillance and spotting targets. But it wouldn't take much effort to arm them.
In recent anti-war protests, marchers have been seen carrying butterfly nets. The butterfly nets were to draw attention to reports of dragon-fly size surveillance devices that show up during civil disobedience marches.
The military has documented the use of trained animals for missions. So imagine a helicopter piloted by the brain of a fly. Or a tank controlled by the brain of a lizard. Pretty bizarre stuff what these scientists do.
Your new overlord might just be a lizard.
I guess female suicide squirrels as an answer would be not politically correct....
Robo penguins... All they need to do now is mount fricking laser beams on their heads, evil geniuses around the world will no longer need to go though tedious process of training sharks to slice up the secret agents sent to stop them!
Not a new development so no El Reg links as the people posting here I am sure will already have heard of it but thought control is coming along nicely as well. There are already working systems where you can move the mouse around wearing a headsetand it picks up the electrical impulses created on the temples as you think. Take this down the line a bit and you've got fighter jets being controlled by the pilot thinking which brings reality to the old Clint Eastwood "FireFox" film where he had to think in Russian to control the plane.
As for squirrels and Penguins they'd look a bit sus to me in the city. I'd be more keen to get a lovely big fluffy wuffy dog like in Stephen Kings "Cujo" and send him off into Oxford Street trained as a killer-fluffywuffy-dog-cyborg-suicide-dogbomb.
No, I don't wanna bow down to the robotic overlords but all the technology involved in creating robots is truly fascinating.
Agreed, the technology is interesting, definitely beneficial and developing at an amazing pace. The problem is in the application of that tech, and the ethical implications of those applications.
For instance, the Roomba is a useful little device. Switch it on when you go to work and it will happily wander around a room vacuuming up dirt and dust. But there are robots now in development whose function is to provide day-nurse style assistance to the elderly. But what are the psychological implications for the elderly patient when their daily interaction with a caring human is replaced by daily interaction with a robot? How do we gauge this? How do we prepare for it?
The application of robots as child minders raises similar questions. What happens when an infant becomes more accustomed to seeing a robot with a human face than they are to seeing their own mother? If, for instance, that robot malfunctions, and stops moving, will the child be affected? And how?
These are just two examples. The technology advances so quickly, and there is such a rush to develop this new tech into a viable product that we just pass off the implications by highlighting the positive impact (and there are many) and neglecting the negative.
In my industry, I sometimes have the occasion to work with industrial robots, mainly for Material Handling. They are basic, effective, and there is no doubt that they revolutionised semi conductor manufacturing, but they don't have any form of AI, and we don't get attached to them.
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The military has documented the use of trained animals for missions. So imagine a helicopter piloted by the brain of a fly. Or a tank controlled by the brain of a lizard.
...
Oh, I think we already have some of those. Doesn't mean they're not nice folk, tho'...
And given that Skynet's been on the go since the early 70s, why the sudden panic?
From one of the articles quoted...
"One of the manufacturers was quoted by BBC News as saying:
So, computers can talk directly to computers."
That's incredible and scary at the same time. I'm not sure I'll sleep tonight.
I certainly won't be going near any of those psycho bankomats, and I'll
probably walk home so the tram's timetable screens don't start gossiping
about me to my microwave.
Thin end of the wedge, for sure. Eventually, we'll all be implanted with devices
that let them know where we are all the time and what we're saying;
they'll probably even make us pay for it! Oh, excuse me...
"Hello? Hello? No, I'm in the Middle Ages! Yeah, Middle Ages! ...no, it's rubbish! Yeah, tschao!"
Agreed, the technology is interesting, definitely beneficial and developing at an amazing pace. The problem is in the application of that tech, and the ethical implications of those applications.
For instance, the Roomba is a useful little device. Switch it on when you go to work and it will happily wander around a room vacuuming up dirt and dust. But there are robots now in development whose function is to provide day-nurse style assistance to the elderly. But what are the psychological implications for the elderly patient when their daily interaction with a caring human is replaced by daily interaction with a robot? How do we gauge this? How do we prepare for it?
The application of robots as child minders raises similar questions. What happens when an infant becomes more accustomed to seeing a robot with a human face than they are to seeing their own mother? If, for instance, that robot malfunctions, and stops moving, will the child be affected? And how?
These are just two examples. The technology advances so quickly, and there is such a rush to develop this new tech into a viable product that we just pass off the implications by highlighting the positive impact (and there are many) and neglecting the negative.
In my industry, I sometimes have the occasion to work with industrial robots, mainly for Material Handling. They are basic, effective, and there is no doubt that they revolutionised semi conductor manufacturing, but they don't have any form of AI, and we don't get attached to them.
I'm worried about what happens when we do...
I've got an iRobot Roomba to vacuum my floor and an iRobot Scooba to scrub it. The more robots the better, as far as I am concerned.
I recently read a posting that mentioned Skynet, and more than three hours later
there was still no sign of any follow-up conspiracy theory references to Echelon.
Linear Mode
