I suspect that we’ll NEVER see anthropomorphic robot infantrymen. By the time such a thing becomes technologically possible they’ll make as much sense as building robot horses for our knights to ride.
Building a remote controlled mini helicopter with a gun makes a lot more sense, and we can have those today if we want to. Putting a gun and a camera on an RC car makes sense, we can have those today if we want to. A robot that looks like an insect with a gun is probably 100 times more likely than a robot that looks like a human with a gun. A flock of 1 inch long micro helicopters that fly around and relay sensor information back to headquarters is going to be more useful that a mechanical human who has trouble getting up and down stairs.
Sure, without strong AI we’ll need humans for certain jobs. But that doesn’t mean that we need a guy clutching a rifle on every intersection. A security guard monitoring a bank of cameras can “patrol” a much larger area than one guy wandering around. And that security guard might have much better ways of dealing with an intruder than running over and trying to shoot him. Remotely locking the doors, calling for backup, releasing tear gas, activating the minefields, turning on the motion-sensing machine guns, releasing the hounds, and so forth. And in the future these remote actions could be done on the streets of downtown Baghdad. Sure, you’d have human infantrymen, but they’d be equivalent to the SWAT team rather than a mall security guard.
I was just thinking of something else this afternoon: are societies actually going to accept the concept of robot soldiers? Seeing as how this development, if it were ever to happen, would be so far in the future that probably warfare would look so different than we can conceive of today, just like how combined arms and net-centric warfare would be completely unforeseeable in the time of Roman legions.
But my thought was this: depending on how these robots operate, I could see a backlash against AI robots: even if they are very smart, could we really trust them to distinguish a civilian from a disguised combatant? If robot soldiers were responsible for large numbers of civilian deaths, I could see that robots would be treated like landmines, chemical weapons, and plastic fleschettes: they could be viewed as too dangerous and limits placed on how they could be used. Civilized nations could view the widespread use of robots as so destabilizing that they unite and ban them unless they’re directly controlled by humans, or something like that. The thing that makes me think this is possible is that nobody here seems to think that robots would make war less likely – how long would nations accept a technology that places them at so much greater risk?
Unless the world is already firmly controlled by a single government, they won’t have much choice. It would be like refusing to use guns; all the treaties in the world wouldn’t stop the guys who decided to use guns anyway from running right over you.
Banning weapons only works if they aren’t very good weapons in the first place.
They were only outlawed for use against “Civilised” Enemies originally; there was no problem with using them against restless African tribes, fanatical Arabs, or anyone else who didn’t speak a European language. :eek:
Even now, the military isn’t allowed to use dum-dums or hollowpoints on human targets, but all commercial hunting ammo would be considered dum-dum bullets, and most police forces issue their officers with hollowpoint rounds. As such, I don’t think Dum-dums can be called “Banned”, just “Restricted”…
Yeah, and the use of CS gas by the military is restricted to very specific conditions, yet is routinely used by police forces here during riots and so on. DT says only ineffective weapons are banned. Dumdums, CS, and landmines are all examples of weapons that are effective but are banned from use in frontline combat. Could robots be the next in that category?
In this thread, we discussed the practical possibility of powered exoskeletons. The limiting factor is power supply; Iron Man can’t go into battle trailing a mile-long extension cord, and no known electric battery would power the suit for more than an hour. Some inventors, however, have experimented with portable gasoline-powered engines or generators. Would that work for a robot?
America, to pick one example, cheerfully uses landmines, banned or not. I said that banning weapons only works if they aren’t very good, not that people won’t pass laws/treaties banning them. The ban on chemical weapons, for example has largely held, because they aren’t really effective againt an army; they may make the troops miserable with protective gear, but not much more. Rioters, on the other hand, generally don’t run around in chemical warfare gear.
Robotic soldiers would be such an edge that it would amount to national suicide to not make them, if you could. No treaty is going to convince a nation to destroy itself.
Bit of a nitpick (I hate seeing quotes misquoted.) “The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots. Thank you.”
I just don’t see the point in a full-blown robotic army. Either you have to make them intelligent enough that you’ve gotten yourself back to an ethical problem or you have to ride herd on them the whole time. Better, in my opinion, to keep going with something like Predator UAVs and come up with ways of outfitting and protecting a human.
Well, there could come a point of relative efficency at which you’d be able to have, for instance, based upon a 12-man squad, 3 fire teams of 4 combat 'bots of limited autonomy, each team controlled remotely by one human back at Batallion HQ. Now your platoon, instead of being made up of 40 humans, is made up of 12, who are not in the direct line of fire. And yes, your military leaders may want the combatbot to be of limited intelligence and only able to perform strictly pre-programmed action w/o direct human control. After all, the High Command should be smart enough to know that before you field a “soldier” that obeys reliably the order “FIRE”, you really should see to it that this “soldier” **will ** obey the order “CEASE FIRE”.
Of course, as has been mentioned, this presumes a development of technology and economics that makes either the intelligent or the “dumb” combatbot feasible at all, as opposed to mechsuiting a human, which has its own set of technological and economic issues to be solved to become viable on a SF scale. Much more likely in the current timeline there will come a time when you’ll have a combination of RC or “dumb robot”-type armed drones plus human soldiers on the line squads, with the mechanical troopers being the ones sent around blind corners or into closed rooms, or made to break cover.