Google.com/killer-robots.txt | Hacker News Reader

Google.com/killer-robots.txt

google.com

41 pointsconfig_yml32 comments

Open articleView on HN

For those who missed this story:

Its the 20 year anniversary of the robots.txt file.

The new Google Easter Egg robots.txt was uploaded recently, on the anniversary of the Robots.txt file.

You can access the new Robots file at google.com/killer-robots.txt.

The new File Reads as:

User-Agent: T-1000

User-Agent: T-800

Disallow: /+LarryPage

Disallow: /+SergeyBrin

T-1000 and T-800 are the different versions of Terminators for the movie series, The Terminator. Here its telling these two killer robots to not kill the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Pun Intended.

Now Larry & Sergey are safe enough.

February 1994[1], so the 20 year anniversary of the robots.txt file.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard

There's more to it. At Google I/O a protestor interrupted a presentation to yell that Google made killer robots. There have been a lot of jokes internally about it. This is probably playing on that as well.

Funny but also a bit scary to think that Google now owns some of the most advanced 'killer' robots. Is Google going to continue providing robots to the DoD or are they going to let those contracts expire?

There was even a protester at Google I/O.

Petman[1] vs. T-800[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFrjrgBV8K0 [2] http://www.cinemaquette.com/sites/default/files/image_galler...

Did they ever provide "'killer' robots" to the military?

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/185570-google-finally-pro...

Sending robots into combat is better than sending humans I suppose

Only for the country employing them... What if the Americans will have "freedom robots" who will "liberate" those poor middle eastern countries, who will never be able to afford something like that? Will there still be a reason to back down when there are no American soldier's lifes at stake?

Only for the country employing them...

That still counts.

Will there still be a reason to back down when there are no American soldiers' lives at stake?

Yes. It's not like the Americans' decision-makers' lives have been on the line in this war anyway.

> It's not like the Americans' decision-makers' lives have been on the line in this war anyway.

Right, they're not. They do still have to convince their people and the families of their soldiers that it wasn't an absolute waste of life to send the soldiers into death. There will be no such concerns with robots, because hey, who cares? It's just a small % of funding.

Check out the occupation of Tehran in the first 10 minutes of the new Robocop movie.

>Only for the country employing them...

So?

>What if the Americans will have "freedom robots" who will "liberate" those poor middle eastern countries, who will never be able to afford something like that?

If that's what's going to be done anyway, better to use robots for it than humans

>Will there still be a reason to back down when there are no American soldier's lifes at stake?

Even if the presence of robots instead of humans results in more combat occurring, it'd still probably save more lives than if the robots hadn't been invented. And I'll admit that I just might care more about American soldiers' well-being than that of whoever they fight against.

There's a somewhat popular novel that deals with this called The Forever War.

Or not. Try to picture yourself minding your own business, and then the next thing you know your neighborhood is stormed by soulless metallic murderers striking from the air and on land.

I saw an interesting discussion about this some years ago.

One of the person involved pointed out that yes, it does feel worrying to think that a soulless machine may not feel anything while killing people.

But on the other hand, if robots were used in place of people, the nanking massacre[0] would likely not have happened. It has historically required humans to really fuck up things.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

Is that any worse than if it were humans doing the storming? Probably better because robots aren't going to do extra damage outside the scope of their orders.

    Google executives said the company would honor existing
    military contracts, but that it did not plan to move
    toward becoming a military contractor on its own.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/technology/google-adds-to-...

They are not going to renew any military robots contracts through Boston Dynamics.

I think it's unfortunate since Google could provide some great software to the DoD if they wanted to. The US military WILL have robots, it's all about from who and how competent they are. The BigDog robot was already being tested by the USMC and robots is becoming a major asset in the US arsenal to make combat operations easier and safer.

Safer for whom? Christ.

Safer for everyone involved.

Complete battlefield dominance encourages enemy combatants to comply without putting up a fight.

If a soldier is in the field and sees a potential combatant, then in many cases one of them is going to die, either from one of them proactively taking the other out or in a firefight caused by fear.

The robot would likely be heavily armored. I don't know many people that would shoot at an armored and armed robot.

That situation will hopefully allow US commanders to take more time to evaluate the situation, allowing them to make more appropriate calls on when or if to take down a potential threat.

That's assuming that the power the robots give the military makes the commanders and operators morally good. Rather than "it's their lives or our troops lives" the philosophy would be "achieve the mission with as little loss of life as possible."

Combat operations are not going to stop, but unnecessary killing could be reduced on both sides with robots and complete battlefield dominance.

Funny that they're among the closest to create Skynet:

«sorry, we were just creating a ads targeting system, but we screwed an if condition...»

Or did they already do it, and they're saving their asses?

Am I going nuts, or was this on the front page of HN only a couple of days ago?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7979909

Maybe it would be a good idea for HN to chop off the protocol when comparing to old posts?

https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/84

Ah. Those are good reasons not do it, but maybe a middle ground that a warning could be shown? Duplicate posts like this are usually a simple case of not knowing it has been said before, so a warning would be enough to nip it in the bud. Ohwell, not really the correct thread for these thoughts :)

There's Google being evil again! Why not disallow * and be done with it?

This wildcard would match other killer robots, possibly those with no disallows at all.

No love for +EricSchmidt?

  Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and
  others in many different sites across the globe. It is updated continuously,
  and built with more tools and technologies than we can shake a stick at. If
  you'd like to help us out, see google.com/careers.

https://www.google.com/humans.txt

According to a friend there was someone at the Keynote of Google I/O shouting about how Google builds killer robots. This seems to be the response.

I wonder how long this has been there.

Last-Modified: Tue, 01 Jul 2014 22:03:05 GMT according to the headers. It probably hasn't been up for much longer than that, or it would have been found already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com