I mostly agree with you, except with that "it's not worth working on these things, they add no value, ...". American government understands, that the nation, that creates automated military first, will gain the kind of advantage Germans had over Poland when they drove tanks against horses. Besides I think their work is very much valuable in proof-of-concept way, and shines light on problems that arises going this specific way. Without people working on these seemingly useless things we might never know what's realistically possible to do and what's not.
Why do we have to work on better ways to kill each other? When will that end? Is that the only motivation we have?
Really.
I don't want to work on robotics to kill people. I don't want my government to throw money into robotics to kill people. I stand by what I said: These things add no value. In fact, from one perspective they take value away. And, BTW, I am not even close to being a bleeding heart Liberal yet I'll gladly join them in the idea that what we need is less violence, less killing and less weapons, not more.
>Why do we have to work on better ways to kill each other? When will that end? Is that the only motivation we have?
This technology in and of itself need not be inherently evil, any more than (as I mentioned in another thread) the Jeep, or rocketry, or radar or the computer or any number of technologies initially developed for military applications.
This is in essence just another way to get a machine from point A to point B. It has legs instead of wheels. I would disagree that they add no value, if one separates the engineering from the one possible application out of many. If the military wants a fully autonomous killing machine once they figure out the "fully autonomous" part (which has, really, more to do with software than hardware) then the hardware part of it - whether it has two legs, or four, or wheels or treads or flies, isn't really going to matter.
If you don't make it, others will. Creating weapons is the strongest innovation driving force, if there would be no violence we would still be picking up berries.
