Asimov spinning in grave

Features: Current EventsCritical Path Innovation: Robotics, WeaponryPeople: John S Canning

DefenseTech talks about a new legal interpretation of the rules governing unmanned combat. Rules are currently interpreted as meaning that an unmanned robotic weapon system cannot fire without a human operator in the control loop. A new 'interpretation', or loop hole, is to re-program robots to aim only at weapons. They should be allowed to fire at weapons under the law. While a novel interpretation, I think it would be relatively easy to conceal the shape of a weapon if you knew that a robot would only fire on a weapon.

The idea is the brain child of John S. Canning, chief engineer at the Naval Surface Warfare Center.


Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA
This question is to reduce automated spam submissions by blocking poorly made spam bots.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.