There’s 5000 robot soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their mission has been to destroy IEDs and to save lives. But all of that is about to change. The Pentagon now intends to send robots into both countries to kill humans.
SWORDS can be equipped with a few different big-ass guns. This is a machine that is meant to rip human flesh apart. Built by Foster-Miller, it’s remote controlled. The goal is to turn warfare into a sort of video game. The operator controls the machine and just blows people away on a screen. No muss, no fuss.
As if that isn’t insane enough, iRobot, who made my Roomba, is also contracting to the military. Their Warrior Robot performs a different sort of cleaning. Basically it finds organic life and kills it. Aside from murdering things, it can also carry things that kill things. It even runs a four minute mile. And, unlike my Roomba, it can also climb the stairs.
This is the fundamental insanity here: The free market can barely support a robot who does something as nice and simple as cleaning the floor or entertaining us. But, if you throw in some government money, we can build robots who are designed to hurt us.
In the next five years, the guv has 2 billion to spend on these purposely dangerous machines. There is something very wrong about how science is being conducted. Someone needs to take away all of the government’s money. People on welfare, especially the cheats, are fucking heroes. They force the guv to spend on something other than killing humans. By doing so they extend our lives.
The guv isn’t even content with the Warrior robot being human controlled. They’re paying engineers to make it think for itself. This is a great idea. You build a machine with the single goal of killing humans, give it a bad-ass name, and then teach it to think.
Nothing but good can result.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I49A09-o9ls&rel=1]
The odd thing is, the impending robot rebellion always worried me. Now I’m more concerned about the government having these things and using them to kill select groups of humans. Better to kill us all, I say. Anything worth starting is worth finishing.
2 comments
3 pings
Daryl
January 12, 2008 at 12:40 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Johnny 5, is that you?
Ryan Oakley
January 12, 2008 at 12:43 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
How the hell did I forget about “Short Circuit”? Another Steve Guttenberg masterpiece.
Pyschological Kevlar « The Grumpy Owl
January 13, 2008 at 4:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
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Iraqis Hack Army Robots? « The Grumpy Owl
May 23, 2008 at 12:33 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
[...] 2008 by Ryan Oakley There are reports/rumors/statements that Iraqi Rebels have decoded some of America’s storm-trooping robots and turned them against the American Death [...]
Murata Girl is Better than DARPA « The Grumpy Owl
October 2, 2008 at 3:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
[...] people. While I recognize that they do plenty of cutting-edge work that often benefits civilians, they do it to kill people. Too much of the coverage dedicated to DARPA has a sickening “oh golly, that’s [...]