January 27, 2005

SWORDS (armed robots) could join US forces in Iraq in early 2005.
posted by Plegmund 19 years ago
  • Lo and behold! another giant step backward for mankind.
  • "Armed Robots in Iraq".. darn..for a moment I pictured George Bush, holding a gun, with Dick Cheney's hand up George's a** , then I realized it said "robot" and not "puppet".... I apologize in advance for any disturbing image this might have provoked....
  • Anyone want to place bets on how long till: a.) a malfunction is the trigger mechanism causes the gun to go full-auto on some hapless civilians b.) the terrorist capture and reporam one of these things c.) the robot wins the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people much in a manner reminisent of the lovable robot from Short Circut?
  • Too late. Suffixing advance apologies. No good. Damn you HB. Eeesh!
  • "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Oooh, I hate that line, but it is a truth - SWORD is just another tool. Heck, The US's CIA has been remotely flying missile launching ultra-lights for years. Any tool can malfunction or be 'appropriated'. But any tool that keeps a human out of harm's way is beneficial, in my eyes. But, I do think a pair of articulated headlights with top mounted rain-wipers acting as eyebrows would help anthropomorphize a SWORD, making it more huggable.
  • Like Kismet the sociable robot.
  • I think I've seen the film. The SWORD goes crazy and starts shooting up everything that moves. Then it gets arrested, but busts out and barricades itself in a hole, then a police station. In the next film, it gets sent to Vietnam and rescues hordes of American soldiers, armed with nothing but a bow and arrow. Then in the second sequel, it wins the Russian-Afghan war, all by itself. Fantastic stuff.
  • People with guns tend to kill people, I find... But saying that, I'd quite like one of theese psycho Johnny-5s. Much more fun than Big Trac.
  • I'm curious about what kind of 'missions' this thing is going to be used for. I mean, it can't climb stairs or probably even get itself out of a pothole. "Oh shit. It's stuck. Go get it!" "No, you go get it!"
  • I'm seeing some kind of cartoon involving this robot on a Mars Lander mission.
  • Our latest G.I. Joe PAC RAT could be simply an excercise to have the insurgents waste all their ammo shooting at it, thereby revealing their location. I think they would be vastly improved if they did have cut-out heads of Bush and Cheney on them btw.
  • 2007: "Oh, those civilian massacres, friendly-fire incidents, inhuman slaughter of POWs? Well, they were just a bunch of bad apples... software and hardware malfunctions, I mean."
  • It's gonna be great -- you know, like the Terminator and Robocop!
  • I, for one, welcome our new -- aw, forget it.
  • Is this going to go the way of the flying weapons platform that was going to revolutionise warfare in the 80s?
  • dj: Err, I'm thinking SkyNet...
  • But any tool that keeps a human out of harm's way is beneficial, in my eyes.
    How exactly is a robot designed to kill people keeping humnans out of harm's way? Oh, right, *American* humans. The only ones that count.
  • Doesn't reducing the risk to one's own forces increase the likelihood of going to war? If an administration can risk fewer troops in a war and thus risk less political fallout, won't it engage far more easily in military action? So while I agree that as a localized effect of reducing troop vulnerability, the general effect is chilling. I also think this argument would only apply if the administration in question actually cared about the lives of those it sends into harm's way. Considering the circumstances, this robot is a band-aid being applied to gangrene.