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Comment by batbomb | Hacker News Reader

So is google going to start supplying the DoD when the DARPA projects graduate?

The article states that they said that while they intend to honor Boston Dynamic's current government contracts, Google is not interested in becoming a government contractor.

They're just interested in becoming the government.

Good thing they have that first law that prevents them from doing evil.

But not preventing them from introducing "bugs". I wonder when will we see first robot genocide? In 10 years? 20?

Whenever it happens I am sure it will be fully democratic and completely lawful.

It probably already happened in the 80s (Nicaragua, Honduras or Panama) with a partially automated AC130 gunship.

What part of an AC130 is automated?

The smaller more asymmetric military operations are often used to test prototype weapons. My response about automated genocide is that it most likely already happened. And I can't think of a better testbed than an AC130 gunship for an automatic aiming system, the operators only see thermal blobs anyway. Not like this, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/

This would be trivial to automate https://archive.org/details/AC-130_Gunship_Ops_in_Afghanista...

Wow, I hadn't heard of that story, truly scary stuff.

This video was linked to in that article, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/video-robo-weap/ hopefully every soldier, programmer, and engineer working on these systems has to watch similar videos so that they know the importance of getting this stuff right.

First law: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

(Only applicable to sentient robots, of course)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

I don't think that's necessarily a negative thing, just because it's Google. Think about how many university professors receive grants from DoD. How many of them are actually purely for science? They are all practical.

> grants from DoD ... They are all practical

You'd be surprised. I've done a couple of grants for projects that ended up being completely open to public and DoD didn't really give a shit about, despite providing some sweet funding for them.

But Google... that's a different story.

I think you missed my implication to his response. The way he put it is that Google is evil so when it moves to DoD and it must be evil, and I say that's not necessarily true just because Google being Google.

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