Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Navy Report Warns of Robot Uprising

by Joseph L. Flatley on February 19, 2009 at 09:57 AM



You know, when armchair futurists (and jive talkin' bloggists) make note of some of the scary new tech making the rounds in defense circles these days it's one thing, but when the Doomsday Scenarios come from official channels, that's when we start to get nervous.

According to a report published by the California State Polytechnic University (with data made available by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research) the sheer scope of the military's various AI projects is so vast that it is impossible for anyone to fully understand exactly what's going on. "With hundreds of programmers working on millions of lines of code for a single war robot," says Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, "no one has a clear understanding of what's going on, at a small scale, across the entire code base." And what we don't understand can eventually hunt us down and kill us.



This isn't idle talk, either -- a software malfunction just last year caused US. Army robots to aim at friendly targets (fortunately, no shots were fired). The solution, Dr. Lin continues, is to teach robots "battlefield ethics... a warrior code."

Of course, the government has had absolutely no problems with ethics over the years -- so programming its killer robots with some rudimentary values should prove relatively simple.

Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, ArtificialIntelligence, California State, California State Polytechnic University, CaliforniaState, CaliforniaStatePolytechnicUniversity, defense, Dr. Patrick Lin, Dr.PatrickLin, ethics, military, Navy, office of naval research, OfficeOfNavalResearch, Patrick Lin, PatrickLin, robot, robotics

Add your comments

Please keep your comments relevant to this blog entry. Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments.

When you enter your name and email address, you'll be sent a link to confirm your comment, and a password. To leave another comment, just use that password.

To create a live link, simply type the URL (including http://) or email address and we will make it a live link for you. You can put up to 3 URLs in your comments. Line breaks and paragraphs are automatically converted — no need to use <p> or <br /> tags.

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular