One of the core skills we have as humans is the ability to recognise and recognise things that we see. The ability for robots to do this has advanced significantly in recent year as the TED Talk by Joseph Redmon demonstrates:
As robots continue to gain skills a number of people are advocating that the United Nations should ban robots that kill:
Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.
We therefore implore the High Contracting Parties to find a way to protect us all from these dangers.
An Open Letter to the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
We have a log history of weaponising technology advances, perhaps even as long as human history. Once you remove humans from the field of war the moral needs change significantly. What’s to stop an ever escalating conflict when there is limited moral need to stop?
If warring robots is a scary thought, how about dancing ones. Guinness world records recently published this video of dancing Dobi robots, 1069 in all:
Personally I think that this is quite scary.
Graham Chastney 