With Geopolitical Conflict Military Robots Are Defiantly Coming
Boston Dynamics pledges along with others Robots for Peace
Saying No to the Killer Robots
Hey Guys,
While geopolitical differences are heightened in the early 2020s, the robot makers are okay. Or at least that’s the messaging.
While the future appears to look more like Robocop and Terminator, you wouldn’t know it by some of the PR we are seeing.
Several robot production companies have pledged not to support the weaponization of their general purpose robots and have encouraged other companies to follow suit. By now it’s nearly the year 2023, Boston Dynamics robot dog, Spot, has been cloned by China and others. Killer drones are now a usual tactics of the Ukraine war.
How quickly our ethics and morals change in times of War. If Putin and Moscow are desperate to save face, why wouldn’t they use tactical Nuclear weapons. Are we to expect that in future conflicts, robots will not kill? Unmanned vehicles have used machine learning to kill for many years already. Heck, Google helped design them (Project Maven).
Robots, like drones before them, have a wide range of peaceful and even life-saving uses, but can be turned into war-fighting machines, too. Killer robots already exist, so why are Boston Dynamics and other robot makers claiming they are among the good guys?
The companies pledging not to use their robots for violence include:
Boston Dynamics
Unitree Robotics
Not all robotics companies don’t want to have big military contracts. Times of war and conflict are also good for innovation, in different ways.
Quadrupedal robots are one of the most interesting developments in robotics in recent years. They were built in part so police and military units could place guns on them, let’s not kid ourselves. What DARPA made China has made as well.
If North Korea harmed South Korea, you can pet Hyundai owned Boston Dynamic spot robots would have a place on the military battle grounds. This could actually happen, pledges of peace be damned. You cannot anticipate what robots will do given the geopolitical stress we are seeing today not just in Ukraine, but at other pressure points. Drones and nano-bot swarms could be even more lethal than they are potentially today.
Killer cockroach robots not killer dog robots might be what we should be worried about. Robots could be so small, fast and lethal in the future, what could stop them? A bunch of Robot dog makers saying declaring peace is not so reassuring after all.
Some analysts claims that the dog robots are small, nimble, and able to traverse environments that frustrate wheeled machines. What’s not clear is whether or not Sword International or Ghost Robotics are currently selling this combination of gun and robot. The Verge report of around one year ago, is not kidding.
Still we can give credit to Boston Dynamics for the press, which have gone from viral YouTubes of kicking their robots to this:
“We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues,” read the open letter.
They are not wrong.
The killer robots are definitely coming. It opens up the door to new kinds of terrorism and staged terrorism.
General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized
Pledges of small robotics startups won’t stop Military regimes or countries desperate to hold on to power.
“We also call on every organization, developer, researcher and user in the robotics community to make similar pledges not to build, authorize, support, or enable the attachment of weaponry to such robots.” The letter was signed by Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics, Open Robotics and Unitree Robotics. There are literally hundreds of such companies all around the world working on robotics, many of whom target military buyers, just like the drone industry.
In the real world what corporations and Governments do is beyond nearly anybody’s control. Even the UN has recently been bought out (African nations) by China on human rights violations. Clearly this world doesn’t have a very good moral compass. If I was an alien, I’d be worried about human beings. They display a love of violence, destruction and deception all for short-sighted goals of clandestine authority figures. What could possibly go wrong?
Ghost Robotics was not on the list.
The company is based in the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia.
Young men can buy guns and shoot civilians for no reason in the United States, but no terminator robots for hire here, no, not at all!
Co-signers also pledged to review applications to buy their robots to prevent possible weaponization and to investigate technological features that could be weaponized in future. But what actually happens to available technologies if and when war does break out? Do we even remember our own fragile human history of constant warfare and brutal genocidal tendencies?
If Russia didn’t have to rely on reluctant soldiers asked to basically shoot their cousins, what would it have accomplished in the Ukraine? If this had occurred in 2032 instead of 2022, everything would have played out differently, but an aging Putin simply didn’t think at 70, he had time to kill.
In 2021, mentions of killer robots were up. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, news of makeshift bombers made of off-the-shelf DJI quadcopter drones and munitions have made the rounds on social media. And in July, a widely circulated hobbyist video of a Unitree dogbot with a gun strapped to its back stirred up fears of "dystopian nightmare" in the press
Robots are extensions of our humanity and whatever tool we have to right, we will, when it really comes down to it.
The reality is dogs named “skynet” have been training for years by DARPA and others. Same goes for enhanced human super soldiers.
We are not family, the United States and China aren’t just at economic and technological war, pressure points like Taiwan, could make Ukraine seem like a petty regional affair. North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China might turn out to be more unpredictable than we imagined in the West.
The idea of global warfare is regaining momentum in the popular imagination after this brutal invasion of the Ukraine. In times of economic and a looming global great recession, the battlefield is the cauldron for robots, drones and other forms of new technologies like Quantum sensing, IoT, the use of Elon Musk’s Starlink that China is so concerned about.
The Chinese government “sought assurances he would not sell Starlink in China” after Musk made the terminals available in Ukraine.
From Transformers to Terminator, so much of our science fiction lore and movies comes from a place of robots doing violence.
What does Boston Dynamics know with this announcement and PR that we don’t know? Drone makers like DJI are now synonymous with sketchy uses of drones, but how could they not, they are by far the biggest producer.
The truth is, A.I. is being regulated on purpose because Governments and major corporations don’t want it to be. If they had, we wouldn’t still be living in the wild-wild west of algorithms, privacy invasion and the heartland that is Surveillance Capitalism.
No, the killer robots are certainly already among us. We’ve also known this for quite some, at least since about 2018.
Robots as Police canine might be more safe than mass shootings of unarmed African Americans police chase and gun down on a regular basis in the United States. At least a robot could immobilize a man without killing him instantly, and apparently for no reason.
Historically DARPA made killer robots an inevitability.
According to Axios, the open letter highlights the erosion of consumer trust in robots as among the reasons not to allow them to be used as weapons. Google used to own Boston Dynamics and clearly took whatever tech ideas from them they needed. Tesla’s ideas around a general purpose robot talk about scalability of humanoid robots as if this was conceivable in the short-term.
Although reconnaissance is one of the most obvious use-cases for robot dogs, manufacturers are slowly experimenting with other payloads. Just ask Ghost Robotics CEO Jiren Parikh. He wants robots that “feel the world”. Would could be more feely than playing soldier and rounding up people like sheep?
Knowing how corporations operate in a profit-based incentive based Capitalism, military robots will come in all shapes and sizes as soon as 2030. Robots bats, dogs, fish, spiders, smaller faster insects - no problem.
Boston Dynamics said it was concerned about attempts made to weaponize commercially available robots, adding that such developments could further erode public trust in technology. My trust was eroded when kicking robot dogs to de-stabilize them was seen as a viral stunt that was cool.
The October, 2021 report by the Verge notes: Ghost Robotics seems eager to find military customers for its quadrupedal machines. Indeed its website feels like a GI Joe commercial for Spot type robots.
The next time you are running for your life at night from a local dictator in your formerly free country and a light shines in your eyes, it might just be a Ghost robotics robot.
These pledges are worthless unless all (worldwide, public and private) are playing by the same rules. It's foolish to think otherwise.