Our Terminator Future
Note to the writers of The Sarah Conner Chronicles, I've got some places you might want to look at for ideas on Skynet's development:
Increasingly autonomous, gun-totting robots developed for warfare could easily fall into the hands of terrorists and may one day unleash a robot arms race, a top expert on artificial intelligence told AFP.
"They pose a threat to humanity," said University of Sheffield professor Noel Sharkey ahead of a keynote address Wednesday before Britain's Royal United Services Institute.
Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world -- from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones -- can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.
. . .
But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.
It we are not careful, he said, that could change.
Military leaders "are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war," he said.
. . .
The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, said Sharkey.
Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.
We do increasingly live in a science-fiction world. I did get a bit of a chuckle out of this, however:
For now, however, there remain several barriers to the creation and deployment of Terminator-like killing machines.
Some are technical. Teaching a computer-driven machine -- even an intelligent one -- how to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how to gauge a proportional response as mandated by the Geneva Conventions, is simply beyond the reach of artificial intelligence today.
Forget for the moment that Terminators aren't generally known for their compassion to non-combatants. Do you really think the guys who cheered Israel's stated goal of "disproportionate" force in Lebanon and called the Geneva Convention "quaint", are going to be worried about their killer robots making such ethical considerations?
The reason we're always afraid of the machines taking over and wiping us out, is because we have the not entirely unreasonable fear that they may be imbued with the same flawed morals as their creators.
