What happens when weapons development goes private?
Good things occur.
Imagine two foot tall robots traveling at ten mph armed with machine guns that stop on a dime and are accurate from a quarter mile distance. That’s one of the future weapons heading our way. Robotex is developing military robots privately, no gov’t red tape, and doing so quickly and cheaply. At these prices we could drop one on every block in a city. There’s no mention of group intelligence or swarm behavior yet, but who could resist? You know they are thinking about it.
But bad things can happen.
The pros and cons of this are obvious. It gets our soldiers out of harm’s way. The downside is the first time it makes a bad choice and wipes out civilians things’ll get ugly. Can you feel the Terminator coming closer to reality?
More importantly is the development of military weapons privatizing. The upside is we get fantastic weapons sooner and cheaper. But will they go to the US military? What’s to prevent the new privately developed weapons from going to other governments; or more concerning other private groups?
Information is scarce, this is a private company and I’m sure the government does not want much information out there either.
More information:
Ethical implications of robots in war ( pdf )
Killer robots from Silicon Valley could replace soldiers
Military recruits thousands more warbots for new unmanned surge
Who Stole the Plans for iRobots Battle Bots?
Zombie warfare: The rise of the mil-bots
See also:
The terminator for pirates has arrived
Robots of war
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
