Robots With Automatic Rifles Could Be on the Battlefield in 5 Years | Hacker News Reader

Robots With Automatic Rifles Could Be on the Battlefield in 5 Years

wired.com

20 pointsrobabbott49 comments

Other than keeping our casualties down, this actually might stop some civilian casualties. Since the operator of the gun is not in mortal danger, s/he can pause that briefest of moments to decide if the person s/he is shooting at should be shot.

Or, since he is not there he could be even more trigger happy.

Hopefully, we can use gamification to provide incentives not to kill civilians.

Psychological removal is a serious concern. It could be a lot easier to kill someone when you're removed by a few layers of abstraction.

On the plus side, doesn't it also lower the psychological harm that happens to many a soldier in sustained war?

Actually the experience so far with drone pilots shows that they get PTSD at the same rate as combat pilots who were physically there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-g...

We're still in the beginning. Removing the "witnessing the carnage" part could still be accomplished one day. As I mentioned, using our brains just to simulate humans on-site controlling stuff at the battlefield may not be the best use we could come up with. Compared to what I had in mind, current drones are just glorified RC models. Thanks for the interesting link, though. This risk is always there, I guess.

I think it might be other way around. It's harder to kill if you or your friends are not in danger. And if you can see in all gory details and contemplate what effect your weapon has on the body of an enemy.

Hasn't this already been explored with the current generation drone pilots, and previous generation aerial bomber crews.

But, since it's very likely to record the events on video, there's substantial motivation to do things By The Book.

Or, N robots could integrate and act upon commands from M operators, where M >> N. Decoupling the control logic from the pointy end could allow you to use the (fast, automatic, and expensive) pointy end at a proper speed without a reduction in control accuracy.

The idea of one robot having one (potentially flawed) operator seems exceedingly dated to me. In conjunction with AI and dynamically created battlefield models, we could relegate the human brain into making those decisions that human brain is good at ("that's a terrorist, and that guy is a civilian") and let machines do their job at what they excel at ("let's use drone 17, it has its barrel only 7 degrees away from the target, already moving in the right direction, and can hit it within the next 700 milliseconds").

When your personal risk is reduced, you do not need to make the split second identification that leeds to a civilian death.

This article came out last month: http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/09/17/emotional-attachme...

I wonder how this will affect robot operators when their "avatar" comes under threat..?

Not really true. Believing you develop an affective relationship with a machine in nuts. With animals is different.

I know those guys in Spain: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEDAX

They mainly deactivate bombs from the Spanish Civil war and from terrorist organizations like ETA.

Of course you are seriously affected when your robot is destroyed. Those things are really expensive. You will have to spend a significant effort replacing it, and it takes some work to make a machine operative so of course you are pissed off like anybody will be is their car paint is scratched by a key.

PS: Your job is also threaten if you are so incompetent to destroy too much public property.

It hasn't really worked out that way with drones so far. Aerial combat drones are supposed to be precision strike platforms capable of minimizing civilian deaths. In practice they've been little better than using car bombs as assassination weapons, with about the same level of collateral damage.

Car bombing terrorists in the middle east is a huge step up from what we used to do: lob cruise missiles randomly into conflict zones.

Drones and ground robots are very different scenarios. Soldiers on the ground have to make split second decisions. Our pilots tend to have a bit longer and are much better protected.

[edit] Also, the current tactics with the drones seem to be set to kill more civilians than needed (bombing again an hour later when rescue personnel are at the scene). Ariel drones and soldiers on the ground are totally different scenarios.

I think it would just make wars more likely because the perceived cost in friendly human lives will be close to zero.

I believe you're right. The thing that probably stops most modern democratic nations from going to war, if we're being pragmatic, is the political backlash to its leaders stemming from the loss of citizen lives. If you remove this from the equation, nations will likely be more predisposed to engage in conflict; its leaders will be shielded from the most immediate downsides of war, and the population more predisposed to ignore it.

The problem isn't civilian casualties, it's our propensity for war.

I think where this can work is in peacekeeping missions/New World Order kinds of missions. Going into Somalia, Syria, etc. to stop internal bloodshed without multinational armies having to go in and losing soldiers.

The prospect of an entirely robotic war is interesting to me. No more bloodshed, the winner is determined by the amount of technological progress they manage to achieve and put into use. Wars could actually become somewhat useful for humanity as means to improve technologies (they already do, but the death toll that comes with them is kind of a shitty side-effect).

A war with "no more bloodshed"? There's no such thing.

To quote George S. Patton, "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."

It won't any time soon be robots vs. robots, because that (with our current tech level) would imply superpowers fighting, and they'd just skip the battlefield and go straight to ICBMs. Or not fight.

What it will be, is robots vs. guys with AK 47s, robots vs. third-world armies. It would look a whole lot like "Terminator", and the bloodshed would be apocalyptic.

I'm not even that optimistic, it will almost certainly be robots vs. civilians simultaneous with guys with AK-47s and car bombs vs the other side's civilians.

Nobody's going to intentionally get in a stand-up shooting match with robot, unless the robots are so expensive and impractical that you can win a war of attrition against them by bankrupting the country building them.

As I mentioned in another reply, this could work very well in peacekeeping missions. I can buy into UN sanctioned missions, for example. Send in a robot army to stop the internal fighting --this would make (a United) nations less reluctant to go in and stop civil wars and genocide.

Sure these robots won't bleed, but those human beings that get the bullets will. And, for quite a few years, I don't think it's about robots vs robots.

No more bloodshed, the winner is determined by the amount of technological progress they manage to achieve and put into use.

Both sides will simply send an adequate amount of people into disintegration booths. No blood necessary.

I'm surprised they didn't mention ATLAS. http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/aboutrobots.aspx

It looks so much like the terminator I wonder if it's a coincidence.

I'm not surprised.

Robots like QinetiQ's Talon and competing iRobot products have been deployed in the field for a decade doing things like recon and ordinance disposal. I'm not sure they're awesome pieces of engineering, but they're mature products that see real military use. There were even mounted weapon experiments with them around 2002. So seeing them armed on the battlefield is not a huge step.

Atlas, on the other hand, looks like a pie-in-the-sky research project. It even has a cord attached to it. It's definitely not going to be on the battlefield shooting things in the next five years.

Disclosure: I worked on the Talon robot (the one in the article's main picture) in college.

Fantasy talk for a second. . . ok, so if robots have far greater accuracy and of course options for self-exposure within a battlefield, why can't their primary directive be to shoot (literally) the guns of the enemy. It would be great if the technology was directed in a way for the robots not be "killer" but rather to shoot at the actual weapon someone is holding and not their person.

Imagine an enemy soldier facing you. The weapon they are holding has a small profile compared to the person holding it, and they are directly behind the gun. I can see a few challenges on this:

1) Hitting the gun and not the person. (duh)

2) Avoiding the bullet from glancing on the weapon and hitting the person.

3) Differentiating between the weapon and some equipment strapped to the armor, or even a pattern on their clothes.

4) Determining if the person is about to move and get hit by the bullet you'll fired at the weapon.

Depending on the damage dealt to the weapon, the enemy can just get behind cover and pickup the weapon again. You are also losing the surprise element, revealing your position, etc.

I'd settle for a really good vacuum cleaner. I've been holding out for years now. Shouldn't that problem be easier to solve? Killer robots always garner headlines but there are a still a few practical robots away from the real revolution. The real revolution happens once consumers enter the picture.

How much are you willing to pay for a robot vacuum cleaner? Because the armies are going to pay a lot...

I think the major concerns with "infantry drones" are signal hijacking/jamming and physical tampering - the latter could be remedied with a well designed body, as well as a fast self-defense system (a gun or at least a high power laser to quickly disable any approaching enemies)...

signal hacking could be mitigated by having them be truly autonomous. So they will still attempt to complete their mission without communication to the base.

Broadcasting a message also may compromise their location.

Maybe we'll start to see more weaponized EMPs.

Now there's a scary thought - truly autonomous... Soon the NSA facility in Utah will be fully automated and impenetrable :-)

Shouln't military throw a tanker of money at computer vision researchers right about now?

Yes. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=5...

I hope this will finally make farad (or even kilofarad) capacitors cheap and available. There is no better engine for innovation than arms race.

- General, Im proud to announce that after decades of research of our brightest scientists our country can make robots!

- Great, now its just put a gun in their hands and teach them how to kill!

Total failure of the human kind: Technologically advanced morally corrupt

DISASSEMBLE? NO DISASSEMBLE!!!

YOUR MOTHER WAS A SNOW-BLOWER!

Because a robot with an automatic rifle is way scarier than a robot with a semi-automatic rifle.

It actually is, since a machine is more likely to keep an automatic weapon on-target than a human being is, just because of the shear strength required. If a machine is firing at me from over 600 yards away with a large-bore rifle, there's not a lot I can do about it as a human unless I have a rocket launcher of some kind. And then only if I'm very, very lucky.

doesn't matter if the robot is pulling the trigger - just like modern automatic gears are actually manual ones where a "robot" is the shifting.

streams of bullets are no longer necessary as accuracy goes up. why waste ammo on suppressive fire if you can simply headshot with high precision? spotting targets through visible and invisible spectrum plus audio? using large caliber rounds that penetrate brick walls, car doors, etc (7.62, 50cal, etc.). basically mount 2 barretts on a turret and wreak havoc.

Only good reason I can think of is where multiple shots are required to weaken / overcome some kind of hardened defense. Of course, these things will be firing some kind of armor piercing / explosive / incendiary round, so that may not be a requirement. Or unless the psychological effect of a spray of highly-accurate bullets warrants the barrage.

"Only good reason I can think of is where multiple shots are required to weaken / overcome some kind of hardened defense."

If there's a simple window, you can kill everyone along the wall by a simple application of a high-precision-timed grenade. "Explode 50 cm behind the window" is simple to achieve these days: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM25_CDTE , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh4uy5A-lI

Isn't a robot-mounted rifle automatic by definition?

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