Robotic Cannon Loses Control, Kills 9 580
TJ_Phazerhacki writes "A new high tech weapon system demonstrated one of the prime concerns circling smarter and smarter methods of defense last week — an Oerlikon GDF-005 cannon went wildly out of control during live fire test exercises in South Africa, killing 9. Scarily enough, this is far from the first instance of a smart weapon 'turning' on its handlers. 'Electronics engineer and defence company CEO Richard Young says he can't believe the incident was purely a mechanical fault. He says his company, C2I2, in the mid 1990s, was involved in two air defence artillery upgrade programmes, dubbed Projects Catchy and Dart. During the shooting trials at Armscor's Alkantpan shooting range, "I personally saw a gun go out of control several times," Young says. "They made a temporary rig consisting of two steel poles on each side of the weapon, with a rope in between to keep the weapon from swinging. The weapon eventually knocked the pol[e]s down."' The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated arms altogether."
Three Laws of Robotics (Score:2, Insightful)
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
"Asimov believed that his most enduring contributions would be his "Three Laws of Robotics" and the Foundation Series."Isaac Asimov [wikipedia.org] article in Wikipedia.
Two words: Deadman switch (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
No pun intended (Score:5, Insightful)
Riiight (Score:4, Insightful)
"But what if we want to have the windows open?" (Score:5, Insightful)
No three laws safe here (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe fill the magazines on the 5th live fire test???
Just sayin, ya know.
Re:Three Laws of Robotics (Score:3, Insightful)
Really, the stories weren't about robots, they were about people just like us, with a certain set of "must-follow" rules. Modern AI does not resemble this in the slightest.
I wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Why was an anti-aircraft gun able to hit ground targets at all?
Shouldn't it be constructed so it can only fire overhead at a certain minimum elevation so it cannot hit anything less than let's say a truck's height from the ground? Sure that might not keep it from hitting targets on higher ground but it would make the gun a lot safer for firing crew and support troops around. Even if it was tracking a legitimate target coming in it might shoot right through it's own crew if say put on a hill so the incoming is coming in at 0
Re:Three Laws of Robotics (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, I missed the end of that story. How did it turn out, again?
An old computer axiom: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Three Laws of Robotics (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the stories in I, Robot are about pointing out the flaws in the laws, actually. From what several bigger fans of Asimov than myself have told me, he wasn't really trying to make grand philosophical statements with them though; they were just story hooks he used for the purpose of spinning a good yarn.
Interpreted seriously, the three laws are slavery.
Three laws of common sense. (Score:2, Insightful)
2) Do not mistake literary fiction elements for real life.
3) Do not mistake literary fiction elements for real life.
Sad, isn't it? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's one thing to make jokes about things going wrong. It's another thing to make jokes about people dying. I'd like to think that the people who made those comments, or modded them up, only skimmed the headline and summary. But I can't quite convince myself.
Re:Three Laws of Robotics (Score:5, Insightful)
Asimov's three laws were meant to be a thought experiment in hubris and unintended consequences. They were sold (in the context of the stories) as the perfect control system for robots, and then there were always "problems" that the USR management couldn't understand and which Susan Calvin needed to figure out and fix.
Asimov wasn't naive, but some of his characters were...
Regards,
Ross
Acme no, South African aftermarket coding, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Young says he was also told at the time that the gun's original equipment manufacturer, Oerlikon, had warned that the GDF Mk V twin 35mm cannon system was not designed for fully automatic control. Yet the guns were automated. At the time, SA was still subject to an arms embargo and Oerlikon played no role in the upgrade.
It may just be me, but automating a machine that fires explosives that isn't designed to be automated just sounds like a Bad Idea(TM).
Re:Three Laws of Robotics (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want really sick and twisted humor, try living in a war zone.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:1, Insightful)
And you make a neat gun
for the people who are still alive
Re:Acme no, South African aftermarket coding, yes (Score:2, Insightful)
It's just you. On Slashdot, we call that "pretty fuckin' cool", on Makezine.com [makezine.com], they call it "neat, but don't try this at home", and at Survival Research Labs [srl.org], they call it "another Thursday at work".
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
150000 people die every day. That's almost 2 a second. I'm sure the family and friends of these 6 are heart broken, but for the 6.5 billion people who don't know them, it's not all that remarkable.
The only thing unique about these 6 people is that they died in a somewhat amusing way. If you want to mourn, mourn for the other 149994 people who died today that you'll never hear about.
Re:Three Laws of Robotics (Score:4, Insightful)
They are a set of fictional laws made up by an author for his science fictional books. Are we seriously going to accept every and all Laws that appear in fiction?
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Any time you are dealing with big guns, fast motors, high-speed fire, large rounds, and explosive projectiles there is a risk of disaster if things go wrong. These things aren't toys. Even if the fire button was completely manual things could still go wrong.
I recall reading an article about a magazine detonation in a battleship which went into all kinds of detail about all the things that could go wrong - and this was a fairly manual operation. It did involve lots of machinery (how else do you move around shells that weigh hundreds of pounds?), but it was all human operated.
Assuming the system is well-designed the automation actually has great potential to LOWER risk. Humans make mistakes all the time. They're even more prone to making mistakes when a jet is incoming loaded with cluster bombs.
Another thing to keep in mind is that peacetime training disasters always make the news with the military. However, the military has a fine line to walk - on one hand they want to be safe in their exercises, but on the other hand they want to be able to handle combat operations. A 30 minute single-shot firing procedure that allows for all kinds of safety checks sounds great in theory, but in wartime you'd lose more people to incoming fire than you'd ever save from gun explosions. Sure, you don't want to kill yourself, but if you're so ineffective that the enemy overruns you it is all for nothing. As a result we tolerate some friendly fire, accidents, etc.
Like it or not robotic weapons WILL be the future of warfare. Sure, one country might elect not to develop them, but sooner or later somebody else will, and once they work out the bugs they'll be overrunning everybody else...
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see you cracking a joke about the robot at the funeral if it was *your* son in the casket.
Now, I don't see anything bad about us making jokes in this forum, since we aren't personally involved in the matter at all and can only feel sorry in an "abstract" kind of way (as in, accidents and human loss are sad but oh well I can't feel sad for *every* bad thing that happens in this world right?), and this won't be read by the affected people. But let's not go around pretending that we are "dealing" or "coping" with anything here. That's just hipocrisy.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:3, Insightful)
The simple matter is, many, many people die every day. Many, many people are also born every day. You can't be personally upset over every life lost or you would spend all your time in overwhelming grief. And sometimes humor is the only alternative to what would otherwise be shock, anger, sadness, or fear.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Testing before testing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would never want to be around a human with a gun, just too big of a chance for something to go wrong.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously.. this thing was built with the explicit purpose of raining death down on people.
And lookee, it apparently did the job it was built to do....
Only on people we've all decided "deserved" to keep their lives.
Unlike the people this thing was *intended* to kill.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:4, Insightful)
My father is a paramedic, and some of the jokes that circle the station after a particularly gruesome scene would probably make you vomit. These men aren't deranged, dark humor is a very real way to deal with tragic events. These men are psycologically evaluated from time to time and the psycologists never seem to have any problem with dark humor. One has gone so far as to tell my father it is a COMMON coping mechanism, especially when one is trying to remain abstracted from the trauma.
I'm not saying they make these jokes at funerals (that's just called tact) or in the presense of civilians, but pull your head out of your ass and realize that laughter is a powerful healing tool.
Re:Riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Think you can shoot down supersonic missile flying below the horizon? No. They let the computer guided robots do that. You're not nearly good enough at it. Ok, maybe you get lucky and nail it. Now try thirty in five seconds all coming from different bearings. Didn't think so.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
That's coping, using humor. It happens in real life.
In this forum, however, nine South Africans are truly remote. They're about as far outside my monkey sphere as humans can get. You wanna joke about them? Fine by me. You want to complain about the jokers because you don't think people really deal with tragedy that way? You're quite wrong.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Government coders (Score:5, Insightful)
If programmers like HIM are writing the code for these "smart" weapons, then I think we should just give the things to our enemies for free.
* I was an intelligence analyst in the Army. I dealt strictly with excruciatingly mundane secrets. Boring, boring, boring. My father was an engineer for Hughes (now Raytheon). He worked on things like the B-2 Spirit ground mapping radar system. For years he "worked at Hughes", and that was it. Later, he was able to say "I work on the B-2 radar system. You'd be amazed at some of the cool shit we do with it, but I can't say what it is."
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's more important to note, that it doesn't make them more dead, or kill additional soldiers, either. And really, thousands of far more tragic deaths happen each day. There are children being molested all over the world as I write this. Sorry if I don't lose myself over some minor military casualties while developing more efficent ways to kill people.
And like the Parent said, laughing does make the world a better place. When unfamiliar people find something commonly humorous, it really brings them together in a really strong way..
Yeah, I'm an idealist hippie, shoot me (whith a robotic cannon).
Re:Guess the NRA has to change the slogan... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:4, Insightful)
But when she asked how he died, he could barely hold a straight face so he told her to ask at the hospital.
Later she saw him and said, "No wonder you couldn't tell me how he died". Seems, she nearly pissed herself laughing at the hospital. She also told him to practice more, he'd given himself away with a tiny lift at the corner of his mouth when she asked.
Personally, I don't get what a period of mourning achieves. Losing someone leaves any empty place, but I wouldn't want anyone to waste a moment of their life mourning the loss of mine. Why is it that the west treats death as some kind of divine punishment, and the east tend to celebrate it?
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Automated weapons are going to make the blood cost of war (to us) too low. We need casualties in the millions before our dumb monkey brains can figure out it's a bad idea, sometimes not even then.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:2, Insightful)
My wife, an optometrist, dreamed of having her own practice. She has had her own practice for ten years and it remains a dismal failure. We are scratching and crawling out from under the debt we incurred, and eventually we'll reach the point where we'll be able to more or less survive. I'll never be able to retire. Neither will she. We won't be able to send our kids to college the way our parents sent us. Nevertheless, it is a constant source of humor. If we didn't joke about it, I think we would lose our minds.
People *do* joke about the suffering and loss of their loved ones, they joke about having their own dreams crushed. So, when you say you don't think anyone does, you're wrong. Maybe not everyone. But people do, and it is valid. In fact, it is just as valid for someone not directly involved.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:4, Insightful)
What is this, a remaining pocket of common sense?
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:3, Insightful)
Warfare, as recently as the second world war, was not limited by counting civilian casualties. And yet many of our refined and erudite citizens now take it as the norm, lamenting even one collateral kill. It is truly amazing the indoctrinal effects of "civilization;" sufficient even to erase the survival capabilities of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution in a few generations. Hopefully we never meet an enemy who has not learned to sublimate their instincts in the pursuit of some dubious higher morality.
As for automated weapons kiling indiscriminately, I think they are just suffering from an acute self-actualization crisis.
Re:ED-209 not available for comment (Score:4, Insightful)
The parents "racist beliefs" broken down were:
The post apartheid government is black. True
Corruption is running rampid in SA, which has a black government. True
HIV is climbing faster than curruption. True
SA is now dangerous. True
SA government (which again happens to be black) spends money on needless things rather than helping the people. True
The facts are that in the post apartheid era, things in South Africa are in fact worse. I dont think it's a black thing vs. a white thing, but when anybody points out these above facts they are called racist.
Your issue shouldn't be with the parent being racist, it should be with your government being accountable to the above issues, whether the government happens to be black or white it doesnt matter.
Sadly, most of Africa seems to be following this trend which is a shame.
Re:What do you expect? (Score:2, Insightful)