Comments on: Drones that make kill-no-kill decisions

By: VelociraptorBlade

VelociraptorBlade — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:57:37 +0000

It DOES seem like a good idea to keep the drones under human control for now.

Also, didn’t they use the armor from Starship Troopers for Firefly? (Completely random, I know).

By: ER

ER — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 23:52:31 +0000

I brought up the Phalanx because it is programmable. It can be configured to ignore certain flight plans and profiles, so it can be left “on” even when there is heavy air traffic, such as friendly choppers or aircraft around. This way an aircraft carrier can have cruise missile defense while simultaneously conducting flight ops. And that means it is fully autonomous. It decides who is an enemy by its flight behavior.

By: TB

TB — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:49:46 +0000

Most of those weapons are used on battlefields, where there is mostly you and the enemy. A Phalanx point defense gun is unlikely to attack an innocent observer.

Mines are an exception, and are probably your best example. A lot of damage to innocent people has been done by leftover mines. But on the other hand, mines don’t wander around looking for something to kill either.

Another SF example would be Keith Laumer’s “Bolo” robotic tanks. The later versions of these were actually intelligent, and trained in military honor and moral decisionmaking.

By: ER

ER — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:36:06 +0000

Great clip from a highly underrated movie
(from the same director as “Starship Troopers”).

Yeah, the idea of autonomous weapons is scary (I can only think of Saberhagen’s Berserkers) but when you think about it, many weapons are, to a certain extent, autonomous. Think of fire-and-forget homing missiles, Phalanx point defense guns, and even the humble mine. They are all designed to kill after making a decision unassisted by humans.

I once worked on the preliminary pattern recognition research for an autonomous homing torpedo (nothing came of it). It was purely a recon platform, but it would not take too much modification to put a warhead instead of a camera on it.