TED talk: Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot

[J_White]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMYYx_im5QI

He is arguing that autonomous drones would be detrimental to the form of representative govt with too much power in the hands of too few.
This could easily be extrapolated to the drone program in general, not just to autonomous ones.

[Natural Citizen]

TED rocks.

[Anti Federalist]

SKYNET became aware...

[Neil Desmond]

And people often say it won't be for another few hundred years before we get this or that technology.


http://theinfosphere.org/images/1/17/Killbot.png

Nonsense!

[Neil Desmond]

First of all, his argument makes as much sense about banning or mandating this or that when it comes to autonomous technology as gun bans or gun restrictions make sense. Someone can build a robot and ignore the laws just like someone can ignore gun bans and illegally buy, steal, or make them (I'm not just talking about making them with 3D printers, I'm talking about making them in any way they can be made). I don't know if it's this speaker's intention to undermine the 2nd Amendment, but that's in effect what he's actually advocating.

Second, firearms such as handguns, rifles, or shotguns probably aren't going to be efficient or effective weapons for fighting or neutralizing robots that are trying to attack you or anyone else. It will probably be necessary to use much more powerful weapons, such as grenades, anti-tank type mines, bazookas (because it would in effect be like fighting a tank), or surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) for autonomous airborne robots/missiles. This is a good reason for why our Founding Fathers not only had what's in the 2nd Amendment placed in the Bill of Rights, but why they wrote it the way it's written, so that there's no limitation on bearing arms. They apparently didn't assume that weapons would stop growing in power over time, based on the fact that the 2nd Amendment is very broadly worded, and we can see today that they were correct in not making such an assumption.

There are other things that can be done to defend against or combat robots, besides guns, bazookas, SAMs, etc. For instance, if people are concerned about being attacked by robots, then they can use their own robots to fight them. Now this gets back to this guy's argument; if I want to have a robot to fight another robot, then according to him I should be banned from doing so. This is why I say that what he's advocating is in effect something that would undermine the 2nd Amendment. Not only that, but just about any robot - even little "toy" mobile robots (e.g., like in the sort of "car chase"-like scene in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_(1984_film)) - that aren't designed for killing or destruction can be used for such purposes. It's not really that much different from the way that things that are designed for something different, such as baseball bats, cars, trucks, planes, or construction equipment can be used to destroy things and kill people intentionally.