Autonomous Robots and War

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Yancy Chaunce World War R: Using Autonomous Robots In War The robot industry is advancing with every day that passes. Robots are utilized to perform certain tasks and ultimately are used to make lives easier and to do accomplish things more quickly without the help of a human. A robot can have a home in many places throughout the world, such as in factories, business corporations, labs, and even in schools as teaching tools. Since robots can be implemented to do virtually anything a person can design it to do, it would make sense that robotic technology would be adopted for military uses. Robots have been seen in war for a variety of uses. For example, the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) is an aircraft that does not have a human pilot on board, in an almost autonomous fashion. Robots that are autonomous refer to robots that do certain tasks without input from a human. Robots that have been used by the military are often controlled by a human or have some sort of human input that directs the robot to a specific command; the robots do not act on their own. However, in the near-future, we could be seeing autonomous, weapon-wielding robots that act entirely on their own, without any orders or commands given to the robot by a human. Despite some ethical and legal implications, autonomous robots have proven to be invaluable in warfare so far. Despite some criticisms, autonomous robots, even weapon-wielding robots, should play a larger role in military due to the many advantages they possess. What is a robot? In the most basic terms, “we define “robot” as an engineered machine that senses, thinks, and acts” (Lin, Abney, Beckney). A robot must have some degree of thinking that it does itself. However, it cannot fully and independently think for itself. Today’s robots are limited in how they are designed by the humans that create and program them. They are often
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