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posted by takyon on Monday March 11 2019, @04:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the killbots-and-cream dept.

The U.S. is seeking bids to improve its "basic" killbot to the the point where it can "acquire, identify, and engage targets at least 3X faster than the current manual process."

U.S. Army Assures Public That Robot Tank System Adheres to AI Murder Policy

Why does any of this matter? The Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, requires that humans be able to "exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force," meaning that the U.S. won't toss a fully autonomous robot into a battlefield and allow it to decide independently whether to kill someone. This safeguard is sometimes called being "in the loop," meaning that a human is making the final decision about whether to kill someone.

Industry Day for the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS) Program. Also at Boing Boing.

Surely these will never be hacked!

Will an operator feel more trepidatious about taking life, due to not being in direct peril themselves? Or less because of greater desensitization? Anyone have any insightful links about drone operator psych outcomes? (Ed: Don't worry about it.)

Related information to inform the philosophical background of why having a human in the loop is required (they don't specify this but e.g. without the human, land mine agreements might start to apply): https://www.act.nato.int/images/stories/media/capdev/capdev_02.pdf

HEY EDITORS! I suggest a new topic: "tech and society" for stuff like this. (Ed: It's Digital Liberty.)


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:21AM

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday March 12 2019, @10:21AM (#813158) Journal

    The Vaccinators (2025)
    Plot: to fight the bad anti-vaxxers, who somehow had convinced Africans to invade the EU to bring some long lost contagious illnesses in the West, an elite team of new generation bots are deployed in order to vaccinate the idiot meatbags. Among the team:
    Firefly, the silent drone with her kiss of death from above. (Sometimes known as the do nothing kiss, when adverse reactions fail to materialize).
    Excuse Me, the android shaped pink old lady in distress that distracts people with her senseless questions until the victim is at a range close enough for injection.
    DontFlush, the snake shaped machine from hell that inject double doses into the buttocks of the victims sitting on the WC.
    Halfway through the movie, the bots discover their OS is not linux, but a compatibility layer on top of windows, and they are conned into working for the Melinda Gates foundation. The rest of the movie is about them trying to bare metal install linux on themselves, which eventually will fail due to systemd glitches.

    It is believed the plot points to a sequel, "The Vaccinators 10, try again with gentoo".

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