Terminator Ethics : faut-il interdire les « robots tueurs » ?

I think one disappointing thing about the Terminator franchise is that I often feel as though it’s cooked up by people who have no background in science. In order to always up the ante and make the system more frightening and powerful, they go completely off the deep end until it’s not credible at all. Then, it’s just disappointing for people who’d really like to find it provocative, and stimulating, and scary.

I think robots are going to have a huge impact on the world, just like computers did, or cars did, or asphalt, or electricity. That scale of impact—enormous impact—but I don’t think the impact is going to be because they become evil and take over. I think it’s going to be just because everything we do changes. Some things get easier, some things will get harder—not many things—and society will change. That’s a lot more scary, in some ways.

Robots Proving Unsuitable for iPhone Assembly, Updated Versions in the Works via @PeterAsaro

Orders Robots Not To Kill Founders Brin & Page

Humans Need Not Apply

Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind

In 1984, just 40 percent of SWAT teams were serving warrants. By 2012, the number was 79 percent. In all, the number of SWAT raids across the country has increased 20-fold since the 1980s, going from 3,000 per year to at least 60,000. And SWAT teams are no longer limited to large cities: In the mid-1980s, only 20 percent of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had such teams. By 2007, 80 percent did. In the end, the driving factor behind the police arms race may be not so much greater risk, but greater spending. This year, Homeland Security will give out $1.6 billion to state agencies and local police departments for counterterrorism and disaster preparedness.

Most people follow a summary dismissal heuristic: given surface characteristics of a message, they quickly judge whether it is worth considering or dismiss with a “oh, that’s just silly!” I like to call it the silliness heuristic: we ignore “silly” things except being in a playful mood.What things are silly? One can divide silliness into epistemic silliness, practical silliness, social silliness and political silliness.

“In the longer term, fully robotic soldiers may be developed and deployed, particularly by wealthier countries,” the paper says (thankfully, no plans to add ‘living tissue’ on the outside are mentioned). The study thus foresees the Pentagon playing a largely supervisory role over autonomous machines as increasingly central to all dimensions of warfare—from operational planning to identifying threats via surveillance and social media data-mining; from determining enemy targets to actually pursuing and executing them.