The Danger Room has a story on American armed robots being sent to Iraq (Hat tip to The Drudge Report). Which reminded me of this similar story from last year, about machine gun wielding South Korean 'droids on sentry duty.
Anyways, it sounds like they're not given a very long leash:
In the past, weak signals would keep the robots from getting orders for as much as eight seconds -- a significant lag during combat. Now, the SWORDS won't act on a command, unless it's received right away. A three-part arming process -- with both physical and electronic safeties -- is required before firing. Most importantly, the machines now come with kill switches, in case there's any odd behavior. "So now we can kill the unit if it goes crazy," Zecca says. [emphasis added]
Kill switches. Now, why didn't the geniuses in the Twelve Colonies ever figure THAT one out?
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UPDATE (Aug 5/07): A blog post on how the laws of war may be used in the future to deal with this issue. Hat tip to Instapundit.
But wait...weren't the Cylons the humans encountered made by other Cylons? So there'd be no kill switch.
Posted by: Michael Turton | August 07, 2007 at 03:25 AM
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Guess I was referring to their initial encounter with the "Mark I" Cylons from 20 or 40 years previous.
BTW, I heard last year that there was supposed to be a spin-off prequel series called "Caprica" based on exactly that. Haven't heard anything since, though.
Posted by: The Foreigner | August 10, 2007 at 01:38 PM