RT @icracnet: Robot soldiers – via @FT

Darpa has become one of the biggest backers of robotics research. Yet autonomous robots bring their own powerful ethical dilemmas. If machines are given guns, it opens profound moral and legal questions about war .. “As a colleague of mine likes to say, robots are assholes,”. Researchers also argue that the more dystopian predictions about machines and war underestimate the affinity between humans and robots.

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The Dawn of Killer Robots

They’re not Terminators, but they sure resemble those iconic killer robots from the big screen. Think C-3PO, not T-1000. That’s the more appropriate pop-culture reference, according to Brian Lattimer, another Virginia Tech researcher working on a bipedal humanoid robot with funding from DARPA. "If I could sit down with Google people, I would want them to make a public pledge to not become involved with autonomous killer robots". DARPA, Boston Dynamics, and Google all declined interviews for this story.

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New Law Enforcement Robot Can Wield Excessive Force Of 5 Human Officers

Engineers say the robot is also equipped with a sophisticated audio command program that recognizes and subsequently ignores such phrases as “Stop” and “I give up” and is programmed to apply pressure to a prostrate suspect’s neck with a force of up to 500 PSI both before and after he’s stopped moving. Its operating system is also reportedly loaded with advanced visual recognition software that allows the robot to identify nearly any object in the subject’s hand as a weapon, prompting it to rapidly empty the clip on its extendable .40-caliber firearm.

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Un congrès à l’ONU les robots tueurs

Imaginez des machines capables de repérer des humains, de les approcher et de... les tuer. Pour le moment, cette situation n'est qu'une fiction mise en scène dans la saga "Terminator". Mais la technologie progresse si rapidement qu'elle pourrait être très bientôt une réalité.

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