One in 50 combatants in Afghanistan is a Robot. | Hacker News Reader

One in 50 combatants in Afghanistan is a Robot.

globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com

32 points_b8r018 comments

One of the benefits of nuclear weapons was that they made total war too costly to contemplate. Any leader considering it would have to weigh the cost of a billion lives versus whatever his country sought to gain.

While I like the idea that robots vs robots could reduce the number of lives lost, I worry that it will also make war an easy option to choose.

Edit: Compare it to police tasers vs. guns. A decrease in lethality results in an increase in the application of weapons. Jevon's paradox for violence.

It doesn't change the nuclear calculus.

It's also worth at least pondering the question of whether or not a "war" of robot on robot is as big a deal in the concrete as human vs. human. I don't have an answer, I could argue in either direction. It's an interesting question. Especially when you try to consider second-order effects.

Wouldn't the beneficial effects of using robots be like the beneficial effects of a broken window?

You are still destroying industrial production and diverting other production into warfare / war-related devices.

I would agree that one conceivable economic failure case would be an endless incentive to pour resources into war, instead of real wealth.

In fact one can argue that Orwell's 1984 had this economic setup. IIRC he explicitly had it set up so that all excess economic output went into an endless war, so that the proles never got wealthy enough to have enough spare time to rise up. He never addressed the question of how the military was structured but in a way it makes even more sense for the militaries to be fully robotic, rather than placing humans in command of powerful machines that could be used to start a coup against the State.

That sums up the end of the Cold War. The US and the USSR were competing by devoting huge portions of their production to wasted[1] war materials. Finally the US out crazied the USSR under Reagan and Gorbachev conceded.

The benefit of using robot war to compare nations' will power is that you aren't one glitch away from Armageddon as when you use nukes, and you don't kill a generation of people like a human war.

[1] "wasted" in the sense that they were never actually used in combat. The deterrent aspect was part of the "cold".

The Grumman X-47B verbiage may have come back through a time portal. The X-47B had its first test flight on February 7th. It's a little soon be doing carrier landings and operational deployments. Carrier trials are slated for 2013.[1]

The cost is stunning. The entire 6 year program cost appears to be only about $600m. That is, the whole development was done for the cost of about 4 manned fighters.

[1] There is a similar looking, much more secret Lockheed RQ-170 operational in Afghanistan, but it probably doesn't carry 2+ tons of bombs.

Combat robotics goes back further than I thought. I found mention of Soviet 'teletanks' being used in the 30s-40s - the remote controlled armed robots being developed at the moment look a bit puny by comparison :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletank http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foster-Miller_TALON

The Goliath tracked mine wikipedia entry linked in the teletank entry was something interesting I've never heard of before (although I hadn't heard of the teletank either).

9 in 10 combatants in Afghanistan is a grenade.

At least for the moment, robots don't kill people, people kill people using a variety of weapons including robots.

An RC car with a camera and a shotgun is not a robot any more than a toy you buy at Radio Shack or a hobby shop.

I would call both of those things robots. Why would you say that they aren't?

Robot implies a certain amount of autonomy, IMHO. First full robotic engagement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dart_missile#Gulf_War_.2819...

From what I can tell, the ground based bots don't have any onboard intelligence - they require an operator at a remote terminal at all times, more like telepresence than autonomous or even semi-autonomous robotics. In contrast, the UAVs presumably have the equivalent of an autopilot, and the X-47B referred to in the article appears to have a very good one. The equivalent ground-based robot would probably be something like a backpack scout that you could chuck into a building and have it autonomously map it.

Definitely the X-47B could be called a robot (or an autonomous, mobile robot if robot takes on the broader definition used by a few of the other commenters). I wonder how it reacts if it is engaged or damaged. Does try to self-preserve by evading or moving to a safe place without human interaction?

I'd argue that the combat-relevant definition of robot is any machine that can perform some combat duty that, if blown up, will not injure or harm a human, only equipment. How simple the machine is doesn't matter, as long as it's out there and a human isn't, but up to this point not very many things have met this criterion.

Certain craft flying autonomous patrols and are capable of rudimentary target acquisition, although they must ask permission from a human operator before firing. (And yeah, I'm in a position to know).

"One in 50 combatants in Afghanistan is a robot"

Uh. No. There is one robot for every 50 US soldiers. The Taliban are not using many robots at the moment.

I'd like to see a number like this derived from manufacturing. Seems to me much innovation is going on there, albeit quietly.

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