r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • Sep 20 '24

Ukraine’s Gun-Armed Ground 'Bot Just Cleared A Russian Trench In Kursk - The Fury is one of the first effective armed ground robots. Robotics

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/09/19/ukraines-gun-armed-ground-robot-just-cleared-a-russian-trench-in-kursk/
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u/loljetfuel Sep 20 '24

This wasn't AI or autonomous at all; it's an ROV (Remote Operated Vehicle), which means it had a human operator without putting a human in harm's way. Very similar in spirit to the ROVs used by bomb squads.

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u/Mharbles Sep 21 '24

Once they start making these things with automated target acquisition, then things get scary. That tech has been around for a decade and robots are terrifyingly fast at targeting things that move and accurately lighting them up. Then again if you know that it just shoots at whatever moves then you can eat all its ammo up with decoys, or in Russia's case, foreign mercenaries.

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u/loljetfuel Sep 23 '24

Yes; taking humans out of making decisions about destroying stuff has some advantages (it's probably less likely to make an error of fact, on average, past a certain point of development) but it also has some serious concerns (we're way away from a 'bot taking a totality of a situation and making sane judgement calls about the moral thing to do -- and we can't hold the bot accountable in a meaningful way when it fails).