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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an obvious step - why put a soldier or soldiers at risk to scout around the corner or breech a building when you can send in an armored quad?

Or have I been reading too much SciFi?

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Not only that. Friend-or-foe identification can boil down to "only targets shooting at me are hostile". That policy isn't any good for human soldiers but robots operating on that principle could avoid a lot of collateral damage.

> Friend-or-foe identification can boil down to "only targets shooting at me are hostile".

And those that shoot at allies. And those that haven't shot yet, but are aiming in the wrong direction. And those that are just reloading their mortar. And those that are setting up an explosive trap for the robot.

There are a lot of ways to be hostile that go beyond firing a weapon directly at the robot, and if it can't handle those, it will be exploited by humans pretending to be harmless.

Shhh... we are going to need to preserve our Guerilla methods dude.

Or just any humans in the area. Since our forces are all robots every human remaining must be in support of the enemy. Civilians should have fled as refugees. (Refugees will be denied entry to the US, on the assumption that they're terrorists.)

I'd say that's sarcastic, but I sadly expect such reasoning from much of the US military leadership these days.

"Friend-or-foe identification can boil down to "only targets shooting at me are hostile"."

That reminds me of a classic scene from the original Robocop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzlt7IbTp6M

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