RT @mims: Killer robots are coming, and it's the likes of Google and Amazon making them possible--not the military

The Coming Robot Dystopia

Robots tueurs, carnage mécanique

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.

The news that Google has purchased a company that makes running robots for the military has prompted the more nervous to see parallels with sci-fi movies such as The Terminator, with its dystopian vision of a world run by remorseless robots with self-conscious intelligence.

Agri-Mark, a 1,200-dairy cooperative in New England that had $1.1 billion of sales last year, started pouring skim milk last month into holes used for livestock manure. It was the first time in five decades, and farmers so far have unloaded 12 truckloads, or 600,000 pounds (272 metric tons). While having small amounts of milk spoil or go unsold isn’t unusual, Northeast dairies dumped 31 percent more this year through May than the same period of 2014, government data show.

For decades, Hollywood has supplied us with plenty of reasons to be frightened about the roboticization of warfare. But now that drones and autonomous antimissile defense systems have been deployed, and many other forms of robotic weaponry are under development, the inflection point where it must be decided whether to go down this road has arrived.

The United States and other developed countries are in the midst of a digital revolution that may be even more profound than the industrial revolutions of the past. Advances in robotics, cognitive computing and other digital technologies promise untold benefits in a world of leisure hard to imagine. But there is also a dark side to this technological change. It could lead to joblessness for most and extreme inequality, threatening economic health and political stability. Tension over rising inequality and a lack of good-paying middle class jobs is growing in Silicon Valley and nearby San Francisco, the epicentre of computerisation and the information economy. In San Francisco, buses for Google, Facebook and other companies ferry high-paid tech workers to their jobs in Silicon Valley. This allows tens of thousands to live in the city, fuelling popular anger over gentrification and high housing prices that are pushing longtime residents out.

Google will build a fleet of robots capable of destroying mankind

Faced with an acute and worsening shortage of blue-collar workers, China is rushing to develop and deploy a wide variety of robots for use in thousands of factories.