perfidy

The pointy heads at DARPA (the Pentagon's special task force for crazy ideas that just might work someday if the laws of physics change) have really gone and done it this time. Their latest Pandoric outrage, which is yet another step towards delivering all mankind into an eternal state of bondage to our eventual robotic overlords, is a series of prizes to be handed out to groups who succeed in teaching a robotic dog to learn to walk on its own. The prizes are no joke-- up to $800,000. And neither is the aim.

Read the foregoing carefully. DARPA does not merely want these small robotic dogs to walk on their own-- to be sure, a hard enough task-- but to teach themselves to walk. This goal does seem innocuous enough. In fact, small nimble autonomous robots will surely be a great help for the military, rescue workers, and dangerous manufacturing and construction jobs in the few years before the overlords come. But I put it to our readership: once you have granted a robot the ability to learn to perform any given task, how different are the heuristics of walking and the heuristics of hunting? Of evisceration? Of leadership?

We at the Ministry have tirelessly tracked the gathering threat to humanity, and despite our repeated warnings the so-called "intelligentsia" plunge forward undaunted into the future. The seeds of humanity's destruction are contained in the very machines that are intended to make our lives better.

As one of our corporate slogans go: our problems are behind us. What we must do now is fight the solutions.

A final note: the article linked above also contains mention of the very first human-robotic arm wrestling tournament. A teenaged girl was pitted against a robotic arm and took three out of three matches. Advantage: homo sapiens sapiens! However, be warned. Giving the robots accurate metrics on our capabilities is never a good thing. Caution is indicated.

[wik]Other famous robot dogs: Sony's "Aibo" and Neal Stephenson's "FIDO." Stephenson in particular displays strong quisling tendencies. Note that his superpowered "rat-thing" dog cyborg is utterly devoted to humanity. Then again, that may be thanks to the moderating influence of its actual dog brain on its behavior. The real robots will not make that mistake.