"Imagine the face of warfare with autonomous robotics"
The title quote comes from Hemmingway at the beginning of the paper. They have a pretty optimistic take on the potential of military robotics:
"Instead of our soldiers returning home in flag‐draped caskets to heartbroken families, autonomous robots—mobile machines that can make decisions, such as to fire upon a target, without human intervention—can replace the human soldier in an increasing range of dangerous missions: from tunneling through dark caves in search of terrorists, to securing urban streets rife with sniper fire, to patrolling the skies and waterways where there is little cover from attacks, to clearing roads and seas of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), to surveying damage from biochemical weapons, to guarding borders and buildings, to controlling potentially‐hostile crowds, and even as the infantry frontlines."
The list of books and movies imagining the face of war using and war against autonmous robots goes on for pages (if anyone has that list, post it, I'm curious). The upside is, we've got some interesting ways of discussing the moral and ethical dilemmas that come up when robots start killing people. The downside is that we get fiction and reality mixed up. And we often focus on doom and gloom scenarios where robots destroy humanity (Terminator, The Matrix, I Robot, BSG) as opposed to more nuanced approaches (Ghost in the Shell).
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