oops, had this thing set to kill all humans…
In the world of popular science, there are three things that bring in readers: black holes, warp drives and the threat of killer robots bent on destroying humanity. Having worked in IT for a number of years, I’ve always been pretty skeptical of mechanical mercenaries. Software with decision making skills is very difficult to design and write because the decisions that have to be made on a battlefield are very complex. The first prototypes would be riddled with bugs and malfunctioning logic. And that’s exactly what would make them so dangerous…
While we probably don’t have to worry about sentient machines thousands of times smarter than us trying to dispose of all things human in a calculated campaign of destruction, some of the many movies about military robots going berserk could be much more plausible than we may think. To explore what could happen when we attempt to give armed robots being used by the United States military some autonomy and the code or the database management isn’t quite up to par, I wrote a little post for Discovery.com. Before you welcome our new machine overlords, take a few minutes time to find out how they’ll come into power in the first place.
