"And So It Begins........" Topic

Some of you thought the Sci-Fi series, Battlestar Galactica was science fiction.

It turns out, that BSG was actually, "science reality".

Apparently, a rogue killer drone has hunted down a human target on its own for the first time, without orders:

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And, you thought your AI couldn't think independently, and make decisions on its own. How wrong you were.

On the plus side, perhaps they can be tasked with taking out the replicants and enhanced "super soldiers" some countries are thought to be researching and developing.

Time to stop the development of military AI, or at least install a fool-proof self-destruct mechanism in all units, before it is too late?

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that".

Yes, "so say we all", or at least those of us not seduced by a beautiful, blonde haired, humanoid working in conjunction with future AI weaponry.

The moral of this story is:
Be nice to your computers/mobile devices, because now they have ways to hunt you down…
;-)

Meh. Let me know when someone invents a drone capable of tracking down unpainted lead and autonomously painting it.

Then I'll be impressed.

Ignore all the imitators. I say we sue the lot of them--including reality--for infringing on Fred Saberhagen's copyrights.

Thresher01, if you thought the idea was original the regrettable 2001, you are penalized 15 yards, and must retire to your parents' basement to READ classic SF. (Hint: start with Worlds of If--the January 1963 issue.)

Did Keith Laumer predate Fred Saberhagen?

Also, before Battlestar Galactica, there were The Terminator and Robocop (remember the autonomous ED-209) -- oh, but before that there was the original Battlestar Galactica. And before that, Colossus: The Forbin Project.

Those are all after both Laumer and Saberhagen.

The problem is that it's probably more cost effective to build a killer drone without safeguards. So the major powers may adhere to a kill switch policy but there will always be rogue nations that don't.

So … a lethal device was introduced into an area where the enemy was known to be operating, and an enemy soldier who encountered it was killed.

They used to call them land mines.

Yes, basically in gaming terms, these autonomous drones are mobile mine fields. They have many of the same issues as mine fields.

And, you thought your AI couldn't think independently, and make decisions on its own. How wrong you were.

Nope, still right about that. They can't think independently.

As a misanthrope, I wouldn't say a robotic uprising that wipes out humanity (myself included) would be a bad thing.

Self-guided seeking munitions have been a thing for a while now.

Oberlindes, "Combat Unit" dates to 1960--but all that gives you is an intelligent tank. It's the Saberhagen story which creates an armed mobile self-replicating intelligence that doesn't like us--or any other organic life, come to that.

(And I will admit to being surprised when I checked. I'd always thought of "Last Command" as the first real Bolo story, and I was old enough and had already read enough SF to know where classic Trek stole it from when they ran "Doomsday Machine" in 1967.)

I remember hearing awhile back that modern software development is resulting in programs with so much complex code that even with checking software and testing they are nigh on impossible to quality assure with any certainty – in other words you don't find the bugs until you start using it! One wonders how military procurement contracts handle this and what levels of potential for error are acceptable?

Back when I was a programming grunt for the USAF, we used Ada when high reliability was required. Ada is strongly typed with lots of safety checks built into it. Yeah, it was a pain to learn and use.

If you're really curious…
link

Software development needs to go back to the good old days when you only had 64k to cram an entire working program into. Programmers now are spoiled with gb's of available memory, which they tend to fill up even though they don't need to (I'm not counting graphics here, as those are pretty data intensive, and we're a looong way from C64 gaming… ;-)