Are Pentagon Nerds Developing Packs of Man-Hunting Killer Robots?

[Nostalgia]

A dystopian sci-fi fantasy may soon be coming to fruition on a battlefield near you.

The Pentagon's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program recently sent out a call for contractors to design a pack of robots whose main purpose would be to track down what the SBIR ominously referred to as "noncooperative human subject[s]."

How does the robot pack decide which human is cooperative and which is not? Welcome to the wonderful, dystopian world of defense work.

The call immediately raised red flags, as well as philosophical and moral chills, from one end of humankind to the other. Not surprisingly, it was quickly removed from the public Web site before its cyborg spark evolved into a full-fledged paranoia over machine armies and murderous artificial intelligence, the likes of which were previously known only in seminal science-fiction exercises as old-school as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and Philip K. Dick's stories, "Minority Report" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and as new-school as the Star Wars, Terminator and Matrix franchises.

Continued

[ZingPao]

I thought the movie AI based on "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep" was great. Except humans were killing androids. Why not? They kill everything else.

[cbamber85]

They've been doing this for years now, they recently reached a major milestone with a robot known as Big Dog. The technology is pretty spectacular, it's a quadraped, and can self stabilise very quickly so it's very difficult to knock over and can run over very rough terrain. I think it was a DARPA outsourced project advertised as an autonomous luggage carrier, but we all know that it was all about the legs...(baby).