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1. Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2017 06:53:30 UTC Hallå Kitteh

   • Hattie Cat
   • Bob Mottram
   • h
   @bob @hattiecat @h Any guided missile is in Swedish called a robot. When I was in the Navy, the patrol boats used the heat-seeking "Robot 12"[0] and the corvettes used and still use the radar-guided "Robot 15"[1]. The Army uses the luggable "Robotsystem 70"[2].
   
   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_(missile)
   [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBS-15
   [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBS_70
   • Bob Mottram (bob@social.freedombone.net)'s status on Thursday, 09-Nov-2017 17:29:16 UTC Bob Mottram

     • h
     @h Killer robots was a hot topic when I started blogging over a decade ago. The justification back then was that robots would make better kill decisions unclouded by emotion, echoing the rhetoric of "surgical strikes" from earlier times, that they meant fewer humans put in harm's way, fewer allied PTSD casualties and large scale swarm formations who would have no problems following perfect choreography (give or take jamming methods and sensor error).
     
     But most of the roboticists who had any brain cells remaining knew that autonomous kill decisions wouldn't result in warfare becoming "a mere spectacle of machines" as Tesla had predicted a century before. One of the CMU roboticists gave what I think was a convincing speech about "the ethics of roboticists" and their responsibility towards the world at large beyond the narrow engineering considerations.
     
     I've been out of the loop on this stuff for quite a while and so I havn't been following the latest developments. My expectation is that things went badly and the most despicable people were put in charge, because ultimately this is a game of power politics and Capital has a way of creating social configurations which result in engineers working against their own interests.
     ghostDancer and Hallå Kitteh like this.
     Hallå Kitteh repeated this.
   • Hattie Cat (hattiecat@quitter.no)'s status on Thursday, 09-Nov-2017 22:12:44 UTC Hattie Cat

     in reply to

     • Bob Mottram
     • h
     @bob @h Modern torpedoes are basically killer robots. From what I understand, submarines don't like to "fire" torpedoes since it gives their position away. Instead, they quietly drop off an autonomous torpedo somewhere then slink away. A while later the torpedo starts off and does its thing on its own. Back in the 1990s, talking to an engineer, I heard that sophisticated ones have a sort of database of sensor signatures of what's a target and what's not, and if they miss the target they can come back and have another go. Parodied by the Guardian's cartoonist Steve Bell https://quitter.no/attachment/1520116 https://quitter.no/attachment/1520117
     Hallå Kitteh repeated this.
   • Hallå Kitteh (clacke@social.heldscal.la)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2017 06:54:43 UTC Hallå Kitteh

     in reply to

     • Hattie Cat
     • Bob Mottram
     • h
     @hattiecat @bob @h A missile defense missile is an "antirobotrobot".