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Comment by whatfor | Hacker News Reader

Is this thing been developed to kill humans?

DARPA is funding the early development of technology they think will some day be useful to the military. Similar to how the DARPA Grand/Urban challenges helped plant the seed for fully autonomous ground vehicles.

So this specific robot is not meant to kill humans, but a robot in the future based on it's technology might. Currently the military has a large aversion lethal autonomous systems, so I don't think it's going to happen.

Currently the military has a large aversion lethal autonomous systems

Humm... what about the drones?

The drones aren't autonomous - they are remote-piloted. Think of them like R/C aircraft... that kill. In any case, all "trigger pulling" is done by a human.

The military, as of yet, has had an aversion to robots that can decide to pull the trigger on their own.

Thanks for clarifying.

Their weapons aren't autonomous.

Only in the sense that lots of them get "flight pay" presently.

Was the Jeep?

It just seems to be a proof of concept for an agile quadrupedal machine. I see no reason to assume it's going to be used to kill people.

To me it seems far from only a proof of concept, specially in light of who is financing it and the rest of Boston Dynamics' robots.

As inventors, I would say it's high time we start to think about the consequences of our tech "innovations".

Yes but the US military already has armed robots. I could see this maybe being used as a transport but even that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be used to kill people.

Though granted if the people it's transporting have guns that's a moot point.

DARPA also financed the Internet. I think we can expect similar public benefits to come out of this research one day.

Excellent example. But we also failed to build the necessary safeguards to prevent using the Internet as a massive surveillance machine. When will we learn something from our past failures?

Our past track record is pretty uneven, that's for sure. One starting point is here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/horvitz/AAAI_P...

Thanks, interesting initiative.

I guess you could strap a bomb to the thing and send it off towards the enemy. I could see it carrying ammo or other supplies to soldiers scattered on a battlefield.

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