Entry 742, on 2008-04-13 at 21:42:19 (Rating 4, News)
I read an interesting article on the Register web site today which described an incident which occurred in Iraq last year where some American combat robots attacked the American troops they were supposed to be fighting with. Their were no injuries so I think its OK to have a good laugh about this.
The robots were SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System) which are a weaponized robot being developed by Foster-Miller for the US Army. According to the report, "The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades." I run upgrades to stop my programs crashing, but this sounds like a highly recommended upgrade, I can imagine the "read me" file: "Foster-Miller has established a problem affecting these units in certain situations. We highly recommend upgrading your robots to version 1.1.1 to avoid being shot at by them."
OK, that's my first little bit of fun so there's more. You can really tell its an American robot when it starts shooting at the good guys. Just as well there were no British tanks around, they probably would have been an irresistible target!
I think the Americans watch too many of their own action movies. The idea of killer robots is a bit too scary for me. Look at what happens in all the movies: the robots always go berserk and need to be brought back under control by some hero.
This isn't the first time this sort of incident has occurred either. According to a comment left at the site: "When the Sergeant York anti-aircraft gun program was in progress in the 1970s or 1980s they had a field test day for it. All the top brass gathered on a grandstand. Sergeant York gets rolled out and switched on, with a drone chopper a couple hundred meters away. The good Sergeant proceeds to ignore the drone, swivel it's guns towards the grandstand, at which point everyone dives for cover. It then locks on to the extractor fan in a portable toilet and proceeds to efficiently and accurately shoot it to pieces." You couldn't get a better story than that if I made it up!
Actually, if the robot is so good at finding fake targets I'm wondering whether it would be better to let it loose looking for weapons of mass destruction. Its amazing that the American military haven't found any yet, despite the fact that they never existed in the first place. A small matter like that should never have stopped the mighty American military machine!
I'm also wondering why this story has taken this long to come to prominence. I guess its surprising it has appeared at all because there is very tight control of propaganda regarding the war, especially during this election year.
I'm not against Americans in general and I would have a good laugh at whoever messed up an operation like this. But I do dislike the current administration and any incident which embarrasses them I gain a perverse satisfaction from. I don't want the fundamentalist Muslim nuts in Iraq to win but I don't really want the fundamentalist Christian nuts in Washington to win either. Maybe both will lose and human civilisation will be conquered by hordes of killer robots!
A link to the Register article "US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comrades" is here.
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