Some scary robot stuff for Tuesday.

Slashdot reports that Israel would like to have tiny little hornet-size droids to film and/or kill terrorists. Perez mentioned something similar in a recent Guardian article, post-Lebanon-flattening. It started quite promising: there's too much death, too much risk. Yay! Therefore, we need tiny flying robots to do the dirty work for us. Doh.

Quite Perez believes this is a realistic goal, I don't know. Though we didn't know we could build atom bombs or fly to the moon but, my Jove, we all pulled together, showed a bit of spirit and jolly well did it.

This is, one might speculate, not unconnected to the US Manhattan-project push for a new robotics era in the military. Notwithstanding that the people who write about it in docs like this are angling for Congressional money, it's still scary. They even have a little diagram showing how they'd like to get from people operating robots, to an autonomous robot force able to deploy and communicate over land, sea and air and into cities and buildings, under strategic control.

We already have unmanned aerial drones killing via US-based CIA operative control; such drones were also used by Israel this summer. The gap here between the 'thousands of [unmanned] flight hours' and military strikes is already almost instant:

Other air force investments of recent years intended to shorten the sensor-to-shooter time during joint operations between its UAVs and attack helicopters also proved their worth during missions in southern Lebanon, the service says. Tadiran Spectralink's Givolit datalink system allowed the service to react quickly against targets such as rocket launchers by relaying images from a UAV directly into the cockpit of a Boeing AH-64 Apache, enabling its pilots to immediately launch missiles.

Speculation: the US is going to need more 'theatres' (doncha love the language of war?) for testing new developments. The Israeli drones would certainly have come from the states. (Note: the few that failed and crashed were immediately bombed to destroy the remains.) This makes rather more sense of their eerie desire for hornet-droids. They might not get these - yet - but there will certainly be plenty of new toys to play with in the coming years.

Samsung have been working hard too - designing a totally automated sentry droid that will retail at $200K. The video on this site looks like its straight from a spoof ad in a Paul Verhoeven film: just the right music. Slightly less actual blood. South Korea is planning to deploy them on its border next year.

We'll have to see whether the new Congressional committees cut funding - but the Korean university / Samsung partnership shows this is a global problem. Robotics used to mean automated arms making cars. At least one country is making a concerted effort now to overcome many of the remaining obstacles to computer systems recognising human targets, auto-mapping cities down to room-level and communicating automatically across millions of devices to, for example, lock down an entire city without a single human entering it.

I don't really understand all the implications, or what's really possible. But if things carry on, we can expect only silence from the UK government. More than any other area of national life, defence is not a matter us proles are supposed to concern ourselves with. It's so far outside the cordoned off areas of democracy we're allowed to congregate in that we can't even hear any voices.

It occurred to me the other night as I was sat in a pub with some slightly radical types: there are now plenty of places in the world where, if you did this, you could assume your chances of being splatted from 20,000 feet were worth worrying about. I can go to a pub in the UK safely because I'm deep inside a global fortress. Elsewhere, some military or politico bod weighs up the cost of civilian deaths - whether its 3% or 50% 'collatoral damage' per average airstrike, its still a percentage they could never, ever get away with on first world soil - and thinks its worth it.

It becomes even more worth it if you don't have to risk a single precious first world life. The Joint Robotic Programme masterplan quotes a marine from Iraq:

These robots saved my life today.

Yabba yabba. Maybe I'll write a letter to someone, or something.