What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

after reading this slashdot article, i got mad. very very mad. my job, what i want to do with the rest of my life, is design non-organic sentience (not robots, as it’s too close to another derogatory term) and this is just wrong. automated killing is simply wrong! there must be a cost to war, or we shall always be at war. and not just a monetary cost, if you are going to kill people, there should be a risk of people killing you! otherwise whatever government / fanatical group / corporation makes or uses these devices first will have a way to indiscriminately kill people whenever, wherever and however they feel.

if there is no cost associated with war, then what is to stop us - or anyone for that matter - from dominating and enslaving other people? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? to the extreme also. would you like it if the current president, or any president for that matter? what if china got their hands on this technology? would you like to have a totally automated robot indiscriminately fly down and kamikaze down on your kids while they play in a playground?

now, i do want to create non-organic sentience, i do think we should continue to do research in this direction. i simply feel that we - and everyone else - needs to become responsible, lest we enter into the second renaissance (which, by the way, i think is much more likely scenario than the ones in R.U.R. or the Terminator series…)

so be careful, and don’t trust people who promise to make war simpler or easier to wage because we don’t have to send out sons and daughters out to kill for us. sending our soldiers out to kill should be our last option, and keeping our soldiers flesh-and-blood will help us keep it that way.