This lays bare the depths of total insanity in the collective minds of the so-called civilized world. The powerful spend Billions to research and design a robotic killing machine with a heart, with morals; a robot incapable of war crimes, as if war itself wasn’t a crime against humanity. As if killing men for oil isn’t a crime. As if butchering men, women and children for their land’s natural resources isn’t a crime. As if imperial expansion is moral. Man deludes himself into believing an inherent morality exists in wars of conquest as long as the Geneva Conventions are not violated. We live in a world where the sane are locked up or roaming the streets homeless, and the insane run the government.
Tim Shipman for The Telegraph writes: the US Army and Navy have both hired experts in the ethics of building machines to prevent the creation of an amoral Terminator-style killing machine that murders indiscriminately. By 2010 the US will have invested $4 billion in a research programme into “autonomous systems”, the military jargon for robots, on the basis that they would not succumb to fear or the desire for vengeance that afflicts frontline soldiers. A British robotics expert has been recruited by the US Navy to advise them on building robots that do not violate the Geneva Conventions.
Colin Allen, a scientific philosopher at Indiana University’s has just published a book summarising his views entitled Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right From Wrong.
He told The Daily Telegraph: “The question they want answered is whether we can build automated weapons that would conform to the laws of war. Can we use ethical theory to help design these machines?” Pentagon chiefs are concerned by studies of combat stress in Iraq that show high proportions of frontline troops supporting torture and retribution against enemy combatants. Ronald Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech university, who is working on software for the US Army has written a report which concludes robots, while not “perfectly ethical in the battlefield” can “perform more ethically than human soldiers.” More
Sphere: Related ContentTags: British scientist, Geneva Conventions, pentagon, robots, soldier bots, Terminator, US navy, War Crimes
