the military is starting to figure out that if they make fighting machines, they might turn around and want to destroy humans in general so they should probably keep that in mind from the start and have safeguards in place. well, duh.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,496309,00.html

Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

Friday , February 20, 2009

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.
The stark warning — which includes discussion of a "Terminator"-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy's high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.
The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.
Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.
"There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do," Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. "Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when ... programs could be written and understood by a single person."
The reality, Dr. Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program.
Accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field — an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

swarming

now back to my fascination with evolving ourselves into extinction...i heard an interesting show on kuow the other day about "swarming." (http://www.kuow.washington.edu/program.php?id=16513)they're researching swarming instincts and how to translate that into robots. seriously.
http://www.swarms.org/

Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors (SWARMS) project. The SWARMS project brings together experts in artificial intelligence, control theory, robotics, systems engineering and biology with the goal of understanding swarming behaviors in nature and applications of biologically-inspired models of swarm behaviors to large networked groups of autonomous vehicles. Our main goal is to develop a framework and methodology for the analysis of swarming behavior in biology and the synthesis of bio-inspired swarming behavior for engineered systems. We will be interested in such questions as: Can large numbers of autonomously functioning vehicles be reliably deployed in the form of a “swarm” to carry out a prescribed mission and to respond as a group to high-level management commands? Can such a group successfully function in a potentially hostile environment, without a designated leader, with limited communications between its members, and/or with different and potentially dynamically changing “roles” for its members? What can we learn about how to organize these teams from biological groupings such as insect swarms, bird flocks, and fish schools? Is there a hierarchy of “compatible” models appropriate to swarming/schooling/flocking which is rich enough to explain these behaviors at various “resolutions” ranging from aggregate characterizations of emergent behavior to detailed descriptions which model individual vehicle dynamics?
Vijay KumarUniversity of Pennsylvania.