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Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Would You Like to Play a Game?

posted by on February 6 at 8:27 AM

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Israel is in the early stages of developing a robotic defense system that has the ability—in “very complex scenarios”—to “generate a level of supreme situational awareness and snap intuitive capabilities that could surpass the very best wartime commanders.”

In extreme circumstances, “where the number of incoming weapons could overwhelm today’s systems and their human operators, [Israel’s] envisioned super system could take over completely.”

Even the systems we currently have malfunction some times, killing people. This idea involves extending those systems so that they’re actually designed to act completely on their own in certain situations, making it much more likely that some bad input or data sends them down that pre-programmed path.

The Israelis are calling the new system Skynet. Just kidding, they don’t have a name for it yet.

Via Danger Room

RSS icon Comments

1

Whopper in the house!!

Posted by kid icarus | February 6, 2008 8:45 AM
2

Does this mean the Day of Reckoning is coming?

Posted by chas Redmond | February 6, 2008 8:53 AM
3

It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than humans...

Posted by gfish | February 6, 2008 8:54 AM
4

Let's play Global Thermonuclear War!

Posted by Jessica | February 6, 2008 9:00 AM
5

isn't this a ripoff from terminator?

Posted by holz | February 6, 2008 9:17 AM
6

Hasta la vista, Palestinians!

Posted by sockknome | February 6, 2008 10:05 AM
7

Also worth mentioning, on the same blog, is yesterday's story of an Isreali robot SHOOTING AND THEN CRUSHING a would-be suicide bomber. What would Asimov say?

Warning: gruesome (but note the shotgun bolted to its arm as its tread grind the corpse into the pavement):

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/02/israeli-robot-c.html

Posted by I am lookink foah Sarah Connah | February 6, 2008 10:20 AM
8

I love that movie. Joshua...

Posted by Justin | February 6, 2008 11:02 AM
9

Oops, launched another nuke!

There goes the Middle East!

(and the concept of nuking Palestine is like Fremont nuking Capitol Hill - we'd all die in the firestorm and radiation blast)

Posted by Will in Seattle | February 6, 2008 11:21 AM
10

omg, someone get John Connor. Jewish Skynet will be sentient before we know it.

Posted by Colin | February 6, 2008 11:39 AM
11

One of my electrical engineering professors had an interesting story from the time he worked at NORAD in the late 70s. Evidently they had a cluster of VAX computers networked together that drove a number of defense systems, and one day a single logic chip in one of the machines went haywire, sending out random binary gibberish to other nodes on the network.

Those other machines were built to "tolerate" failures like that by ignoring any sequences they didn't understand. However, just by random chance the gibberish would occasionally line up with an actual meaningful instruction, and soon the computers began to light up with false targets and indications of missile launches. Evidently things got pretty high up the chain of command before they figured out it was all bogus.

Posted by scott Durham | February 6, 2008 2:52 PM
12

It's "Shall we play a game?"

Not "Do you feel like maybe playing a game or something?"

Posted by Ben | February 6, 2008 4:06 PM

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