Tags: drone drones

Or: several varieties of nerdy hacker types gathered together in the Catskills and experimenting with robots

Tags: drone drones

"Unfortunately, there are yet further problems: most pertinently, even if their glitches could be ironed out, Asimov’s laws will remain simply inapplicable to the military context, as it is likely that autonomous military robots will be asked to exercise lethal force upon humans in order to attain mission objectives, thereby violating Asimov’s First Law. A further problem, called ‘rampancy’, involves the possibility that an autonomous robot could overwrite its own basic programming and substitute its own new goals for the original mission objectives (e.g., the movie Stealth). That leads us to a final and apparently conclusive reason why deontological ethics cannot be used for autonomous military robots: it is incompatible with a ‘slave morality’, as addressed in the following discussion (and further in section 6)."

— The Office of Naval Research report (link is a .pdf) on the ethics of autonomous military robots. Strangely, a ruleset devised for fiction and used as the basis of a series of novels exploring their flaws is a poor guideline for the real world, and especially for military applications, no offense to Asimov.

Drones for art, culture, and wonder. This one seems to specialize in adorbs, but the red-teamer in me can’t help but wonder what would happen if you put an IED in it and linked the trigger to a detection of “X people within 30 feet.”

Tags: drone drones

From 2:45 to 3:20 in this clip, Joshua Trevino raises an interesting question: if our role in WWII was just, does that make our conduct in it acceptable? And, as follow-up, how does that debate relate to our conversation about drone war in Yemen?