Uk to use spy drones

The Guardian is reporting that military spy drone technology is to be deployed by 2012 in the UK

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/23/cctv-sky-police-plan-drones

Robot Border Guards

A MIGRANT makes a furtive dash across an unwalled rural section of a national border, only to be confronted by a tracked robot that looks like a tiny combat tank - with a gimballed camera for an eye. As he passes the bug-eyed droid, it follows him and a border guard's voice booms from its loudspeaker. He has illegally entered the country, he is warned, and if he does not turn back he will be filmed and followed by the robot, or by an airborne drone, until guards apprehend him.

Welcome to the European border of the not-too-distant future. Amid the ever-present angst over illegal immigration, cross-border terrorism and contraband smuggling, some nations are turning to novel border-surveillance technologies, potentially backed up by robots, a conference on state security at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, heard in November. The idea is to scatter arrays of sensors in a border area in ways that give guards or robots plenty of time to respond before their targets make good an escape.

An article at NewScientist titled, Robot border guards to patrol future frontiers, reports that:

the US Department of Homeland Security, along with Boeing Intelligence and Security Systems, is fielding sensors on the border with Mexico, in an $8 billion project called the Secure Border Initiative network.

Managing Data From Drones

Military Is Awash in Data From Drone writes Christopher Drew in the NYTIMES.

Lt. Col. Brendan M. Harris, who is in charge of an intelligence squadron here . . . said the Air Force had just installed telestrators on its latest hand-held video receiver, and harried officers in the field would soon be able to simply circle the images of trucks or individuals they wanted the drones to follow.

But Colonel Harris also said that the drones often shot gray-toned video with infrared cameras that was harder to decipher than color shots. And when force is potentially involved, he said, there will be limits on what automated systems are allowed to do.

“You need somebody who’s trained and is accountable in recognizing that that is a woman, that is a child and that is someone who’s carrying a weapon,” he said. “And the best tools for that are still the eyeball and the human brain.”

Israel and 40 Other Countries Building Unmanned Fighting Machines

In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel's military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel's leading weapons manufacturers.

In an article published on WSJ.COM titled, Israeli Robots Remake Battlefield
Nation Forges Ahead in Deploying Unmanned Military Vehicles by Air, Sea and Land, Charles Levinson writes that, "Over 40 countries have military-robotics programs today." If anyone knows where this figure comes from, let us know. In the video included with this article, Levinson makes it clear that the unmanned fighting machines that Israel is developing are being designed so they can make decisions without a human in the loop.

Sharkey interviews Singer

Noel Sharkey interviews Peter Singer (Wired for War) for his Sound of Science webcast.

Elevators and Ethics

Yesterday on NPR there was an "All Tech Considered" piece about the latest generation of smart elevator controllers that can compute in real time the most efficient allocation of stops to floors to minimize passenger waiting time. The story dwelled quite a bit on the loss of human operators, but it was casually mentioned that a company is developing a smartphone application that will communicate with the elevator controller so that it is "aware" that you will be arriving at the elevator shaft within a few minutes, and schedule accordingly. This raises a number of interesting issues, quite aside from the surveillance opportunities it affords. For instance, how will the system know whether you are just leaving work to run an errand, or that you have a particular situation (e.g. a medical emergency at home) that might require a "less efficient" decision to be taken in order to transport you before other people who might have been waiting longer. Could such machines be designed better to detect and respond flexibly to such contingencies? I don't see why not, but what are the dangers of going down the route towards autonomous machines making decisions that are sensitive to the ethically relevant features of not entirely predictable situations?


Letters: Football, Elevator Technology
January 12, 2010 ... SIEGEL: Yesterday in our All Tech Considered segment, we heard about the latest in elevator technology. ...
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122498267

George Bekey interview

George Bekey is interviewed by Gerhard Dabringer for his ongoing series of discussions with roboticists and philosophers with something to say about the ethics of military roboticization.