Recycle bots should follow the front lines to melt down robot casualties into reinforcements. Recycle bots could then create the soylent green to fuel the engineers, forced to design ever more effective warbots. Of course, this thread has been photoshoped. The book was written by a corporate anti-healthcare robot who wants to trick us into letting him rule our pool!

And, I’m just guessing, that robots are pretty unlikely to use mass rape as a tactic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnvOGO387ag

“Oh, look! There’s a rape machine – I’d go outside if he’d look the other way. You wouldn’t believe the things they do.”

This.

War is not nice. It kills people and breaks things. There are no rules of war. The only objective in war is to win, and any country that adopts rules is limiting itself arbitrarily.

Just ask the Carthaginians what they had to say about that. Oh wait, you can’t, because Rome destroyed them and their entire history.

Beside the crudeness/immorality of violence, it seems to me that the concern here is that in the process of destroying “the enemy” you’ll also destroy yourself. “When one fights with monsters, one must take care not to become a monster.”

Whether it’s Skynet who was programmed to “defend the USA from its enemies” and interpreted “enemies” as “humans” and not just “Soviets” (echoes of the AM computer from “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream“) or simply the paradox of “we had to destroy the village to save the village” (e.g. “The War on Terror”), beware the costs of war.

Consider this quote by Robert A. Heinlein,

I also think there are prices too high to pay to save the United States. Conscription is one of them. Conscription is slavery, and I don’t think that any people or nation has a right to save itself at the price of slavery for anyone, no matter what name it is called. We have had the draft for twenty years now; I think this is shameful. If a country can’t save itself through the volunteer service of its own free people, then I say : Let the damned thing go down the drain!

Obviously, war robots would be weapons, designed to kill people, and will never give us the warm and fuzzies; but I find the notion that they are inevitably worse than humans quite dubious. Robots may not be empathetic; but they are not sadistic. Nor does fear dull their judgment, nor do they have any notion of vengeance. And, I’m just guessing, that robots are pretty unlikely to use mass rape as a tactic.

Good Afternoon. The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea, but in space, or on top of a really tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots, and as you leave here today, your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank You.

Get ready for Second Variety / Screamers.

Yeah, he was fun reading when I was 16, so was Ayn Rand. But his misogyny was hideous and exceeded only by his militarism his elitism.

I prefer real stories peopled with real characters. That’s why I don’t read SF any more. Not since I was in my 20′s anyway. Sure a certain amount of escapism is fun but I’ve gotten to the point where technological spectacle, Sf or whatever, just bores me to tears. These days I want human drama. The less SF is in a book or movie the better it is in my opinion.

“Up” is far superior to that horrible drivel they call the latest Star Trek movie and “The Hurt Locker” is ten time better than anything else released so far this summer. Hollywood and the “SyFy” channel are killing SF, thank the gods. I did enjoy the latest “Torchwood, Children of Earth” series but that was because there was very little actual SF in it.

Jesus.

People are pretty much guaranteed to make mistakes. Computers, when they are running programs that are finished and properly run, rarely do.

Also, yes. Robots that are able to calculate density and select non-penetrating ammunition on the fly, as well as visually assess targets and calculate threat within nanoseconds are less likely to cause collateral damage than panicky kids with machine guns.

Robots will likely not surpass the best of humans, but they are always better than the worst of humans.

The whole point of war-fighting robots is to eliminate the pesky conscience of the individual soldier, who might be undisciplined enough to question the basis for the war, or to listen attentively to a civilian pleading for her life.

Adding a morality module to such a machine would be like applying perfume to my hammer.

http://www.thelocal.se/19120.html

Forget Terminator and think War Games: “The only winning move is not to play.”