Quick Draw Robots
TheDailyBeast
Christopher Dickey | TheDailyBeast
The world may discover some hard truths this week at the amazing DARPA Robotics Challenge, a competition for the world’s next-generation machines.
Valkyrie and her fellow competitors—Chimp, RoboSimian, Hubo, Schaft and Thor—are at the center of a debate beset by distortions and spin on every side. Their developers want to portray them as benign; their detractors want to ban “killer robots.” But what’s certainly true is that we’re at “the beginning of a historic transformation in robotics,” as DARPA puts it. And the inescapable reality is that some machines will save lives and some will take lives, and they’ll be programmed to make the relatively simple but critical decisions on their own that determine who survives and who dies.
The implications are enormous as all this comes amid widespread and growing excitement about robotics in daily life.“A year ago, no countries were talking about this topic,” says Mary Wareham at Human Rights Watch. Now, more than 40 countries have spoken out on it, most of them supporting some sort ...
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