Robots at war

[Salem]

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-age-of-the-killer-robot-is-no-longer-a-scifi-fantasy-1875220.html

> "You can't appeal to robots for mercy or empathy - or punish them afterwards"
But they are infinitely easier to re-program and send back. I'm sure a few hacked droids coming back which promptly explode will cause some pause.
Though no doubt the folly will be to "keep digging" rather than consider what kind of world is being created.

> "Some 4 per cent of US factories have "major robotics accidents" every year..."
How long before a real-life ED-209 moment?
This killing machine was built by the lowest bidder using the weakest design principles (aka the cheapest). Explain to me how that isn't going to result in 0 deaths, 0 injuries before it gets to the field because of malfunction.

In T2, there is the scene where the young John Connor quips "I guess skynet doesn't want you to do too much thinking", referring to the neural-net of the terminator being in "read-only" mode.
The same could be said of the DoD and CIA - not a whole lot of thinking going on there either.

[sneekula]

It will make future wars so much easier! Send in your robots, make a mess out of that country and leave. Any politicians dream!

The only defense against such an attack is to have nuclear weapons and a good delivery system, retaliatory weapons produced and stored in secretive deep underground systems.

[vegaseat]

Hate to think what will happen if those war robots return home infected with a computer virus.

[HiHe]

Think about all those high paying jobs repairing and reprogramming robots.

[GrimJack]

Heh,heh - there are already self-repairing surfaces. The robots that come for you might not look like what you expect:
spot,
love-doll,
living in your body,
in the air,

we are all doomed

[Ene Uran]

A nano robot made to seek and destroy human sight and hearing sounds just a little too scary! Something the sickos in defense might just drool over.

[vegaseat]

Almost invisible nano robots attacking human tissue, ouch! Lots of money to be made there!

[Ene Uran]

Almost invisible nano robots attacking human tissue, ouch! Lots of money to be made there!

Would make a good movie, but then who wants to see a monster movie where you can't see the monsters.

[GrimJack]

Almost invisible nano robots attacking human tissue, ouch! Lots of money to be made there!

But the money is in the defender nanobots. See you have a permanent set of nanos in your system that work to keep your body the way they found it vs a set of nanos working to change it. The nonobot race will follow virus/anti-virus cyber conflicts already taking place.

[vegaseat]

But the money is in the defender nanobots. See you have a permanent set of nanos in your system that work to keep your body the way they found it vs a set of nanos working to change it. The nonobot race will follow virus/anti-virus cyber conflicts already taking place.

Clever!
So only a country that has attacker and defender technology will survive.

[GrimJack]

Accidents could happen, one of the ideas I have been working on is a nano-factory making diamond material (diamonds have more tensile strength than steel) breaks loose and begins using all the carbon it finds to make diamonds and, well, we are a carbon based lifeform.

I started thinking about it while discussing space elevators with some friends; diamond rope would be the strongest but it has a weakness for shear so we considered sheathing in graphite nanotubes. Diamonds on demand would have so many uses that it seemed obvious it would be among the first products from nano-factories. In my research I came across an article on the possibility of lakes of diamond on Neptune.

But I digress

[cwarn23]

I wonder how long until they invent replicators. Replicators would be able to wipe out the robots with no problem. Or what about hackers hacking into a robot network. A hacker could send a Trojan to all robots in the United States and give those robots the command to destroy everything in sight. G' the future hackers have a lot more to play with...

[vegaseat]

The 2004 movie iROBOT addresses some of these questions. It also presents the idea that the robots get more and more sophisticated with time and start to think on their own, bypassing some of the basic rules.

BTW, they use nano robots to destroy uncooperative robots. Kind of goofy, since Will Smith just blows them out of their existence with his 80-shooter.