Man, you put these two developments together and you have some pretty hairy implications (both of these are from last year, I guess):

First off, the Air Force is testing a robotic vehicle for use as a security guard on bases. MSNBC is featuring a creepy quote as the sub-title for that article: “If you shoot the robot we don’t care”. Yeah right. Until they equip the robot with guns and then it kills you. As Ran said in reference a similar news item a while back:

For the moment, they’re just remote extentions of human operators. Now, if the human operator sees another human attacking the robot, will he fire on that human? Of course!

Do you see the problem? A human is being killed for attacking a machine. When cops kill people, they always use the excuse that they fear their lives, human lives, are in danger. Now they’re trying to slip this one by us, and get us to accept that a machine can kill in “self”-defense, or that a human can be murdered on the spot for attacking a lifeless object. It’s as if you take a baseball bat to a port-a-john, and a gun sticks out and shoots you dead, and it’s legal. Eventually, the family of a human killed by a robot will take it to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court will have to say, yes, a machine has a right to kill a human, because if they say no, the system will collapse.

Ah shit, I can’t wait. They also close that article by talking about how similar the controls for the robot are to a Playstation or Xbox, which is an insidious way to sneak around the seriousness of this issue. “Oh it will be cool like video games!”

Next on the chopping block is an article about a bunch of new crowd control weapons that are coming out: basically lasers that can incapacitate an entire crowd. Here’s a description of one:

Instead of using fibres, the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the target, producing a conducting channel. It will also interfere with electronic ignition systems and stop vehicles.

“We will be able to fire a stream of electricity like water out of a hose at one or many targets in a single sweep,” claims XADS president Peter Bitar.

Neat, you just hook up these lasers to the above mentioned robots, roll them out remotely through a city, and presto! problem solved. Then you can just send in another robot-jailor to collect the bodies.

[Via Tech-Watch]