Oops....

[patgund]

Sounds like they have some debugging to do on this verion of cylon combat robot.

US war robots in Iraq 'turned guns' on fleshy comrades

"Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.

The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.

Speaking to Popular Mechanics, Fahey said there had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS* combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.

"The gun started moving when it was not intended to move," he said."

Comments

[jeran.livejournal.com]

const bool is_suprised = false;

Expressing "if looks human then shoot" in program code is easy. Expressing "if human then ( if hostile then shoot else if friendly then ignore )" is a little more complicated. Add in the multiple error conditions that even that simple version ignores and you get into code that drives Azathoth insane. Hand that job to some of the gooey-weenies I've seen passing themselves off as developers these days and it can only end in tears.

[electorprince.livejournal.com]

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords, and hope that my selfless sacrifice of my free will in the performance of their erudite and logical works will immortalize my name long after my flesh is dissolved into capacitor paste.

[jj-maccrimmon.livejournal.com]

Sounds like SkyNet is up and running.

[morgan-gw.livejournal.com]

Combining this with another sci-news story I saw this week: http://morgan-gw.livejournal.com/76465.html