When I interviewed Wired for War author PW Singer last March, he told me that the preconditions for a successful Terminator-type uprising are not in place. As computer development accelerates, however, those preconditions become way more possible.
When people talk about robots and ethics, they always seem to bring up Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” But there are three major problems with these laws and their use in our real world.
newVideoPlayer("/Fukushima_Robots_Giz.flv", 504, 399,""); There are plenty of robot builders, but none bring as much elegance to engineering as Shigeo Hirose. His creatures are Star Wars, Iron Giant and Dean Kamen rolled into one cybernetic maki.
Long before Predator drones and PackBots patrolled Iraq and Afghanistan, unmanned systems were used in combat—as far back as WWI and WWII, in fact. Here’s a quick look at the coolest of the old-timey warbots:
If you shrug off Terminator and Battlestar Galactica as never-gonna-happen impossibilities, PW Singer has news for you. His spine-tingling book, Wired For War, carefully explains the robotics revolution that’s gripped our military since 9/11.
