If You Can't Read Between The Lines On This "Boston Robotics Pledging To Never Weaponize Their Robots" Then You Have Rocks In Your Head. The End Is Near.
\Tech Crunch - This morning, a group of prominent robotics firms issued an open letter condemning the weaponization of “general purpose” robots. Signed by Boston Dynamics, Agility, ANYbotics, Clearpath Robotics and Open Robotics, the letter notes, in part:
We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues. Weaponized applications of these newly-capable robots will also harm public trust in the technology in ways that damage the tremendous benefits they will bring to society.
The piece comes amid mounting concern around the proliferation of advanced robotics systems like Boston Dynamics’ Spot and Agility’s Digit. Fictional works like “Black Mirror,” coupled with real-world efforts like the Ghost Robotics dog that has been outfitted with a sniper rifle, have raised significant red flags for many.
After an art collective mounted a paintball gun to the back of Spot, a Boston Dynamics rep told TechCrunch:
They came to us with the idea that they were going to do a creative project with Spot. They’re a creative group of guys, who have done a bunch of creative things. In our conversations, we said that if you want to cooperate with us, we want to make it clear that the robots will not be used in any way that hurts people.
Chief blogged this yesterday -
Unbeknownst to either of us, we were writing on the topic at the same time, and he beat me to hitting submit by two minutes. Which honestly pissed me off because he's the guy who loves to scoff at me for proselytizing to everybody about how artificial intelligence is going to wipe humans off the face of the Earth, and we are creating something we can't control, and will be the end of us.
So remember where you were today when you read this. Because these are famous last words from these surely noble engineers and robotics geeks.
Watch a Bond movie for me one time. Hell, watch a Marvel movie for me. Because this is how every plot goes.
Some brilliant mind(s) use their talents and gifts to invent at technology with the the most virtuous of intentions in mind. To save the planet. Benefit humanity. And whatnot.
And what always ends up happening?
Some evil dictator, billionaire, or shadow government overtakes them, steals the technology or whatever, and we're all fucked.
And this is real life, so there's no Iron Man or 007 to come save our asses sad to say.
And if one of those scenarios doesn't play out, there's always the one kind of squirrelly guy (or company) you have to watch out for going rogue. It happens every time.
And I'm calling my shot right now- Ghost Robotics. I see you mother fuckers.
Ghost Robotics, which has its own take on the topic, told TechCrunch at the time:
We don’t make the payloads. Are we going to promote and advertise any of these weapon systems? Probably not. That’s a tough one to answer. Because we’re selling to the military, we don’t know what they do with them. We’re not going to dictate to our government customers how they use the robots.
We do draw the line on where they’re sold. We only sell to U.S. and allied governments. We don’t even sell our robots to enterprise customers in adversarial markets. We get lots of inquiries about our robots in Russia and China. We don’t ship there, even for our enterprise customers.
"Hey guys, we're not making any promises because we can't control what happens with these things once we sell them. Our hands are clean."
Ok buddy.
How about we just cut to the chase and you tell us how long we have until we're all working in the mines, enslaved by these robots, mining materials for them so they can continue to replicate like the Clone Wars in Star Wars, or iRobot?
Because make no mistake, we're there already-
Sidebar - I have a confession to make. When I was a kid in middle school I was a huge computer game nerd. As soon as we got a hand-me-down computer that didn't almost burst into flames by running anything other than minesweeper or solitaire on it, (I believe it was a Compaq Presario), I loaded that bitch up with some unreal games and would spend hours and hours playing them. Doom of course, everybody's favorite. Tomb Raider, and my personal favorite, Mech Warrior. For those that have no clue what Mech Warrior was, it was a futuristic war game where soliders wore these giant robot suits that you could walk, run, jump, and fight in.
They had rockets and guns on the arms and were incredible. I bring this up because they, the Mech Warrior machines, also seem to have arrived…)
And I HATE to be the pessimist here, but you have to be realistic here. There is just no way this technology doesn't fall into the wrong hands. If none of the scenarios above occur, then you can bet your ass those weasles in Russia or China will steal it like they do everything else from us. They'll either pay some treasonous fuck to give it to them, embed spies here (they're probably already working at these companies), or just buy it and reverse engineer it like they do everything. No matter what way you cut it, we're fucked.
All because we didn't listen to Steve.
And now it's way too late.
We had a good run, everybody!