Calls for restrictions on war robots

[tater]

We can have proportional response and send our own suicide attackers, except ours will be robots!

[TLAM Strike]

Originally Posted by tater

We can have proportional response and send our own suicide attackers, except ours will be robots!

We got those, they are called cruise missiles.

Originally Posted by Rilder

Wouldn't robots fighting on enemy soil give the enemy an advantage unless conquest is assured?

I mean all the robot wrecks might be able to be salvaged/scrapped for parts;resources/etc, so given an overly long war attacking armies would expend drastically more resources then the defenders.

Same could be said of a conventional human focused army. Rifles, armor, vehicles even uniforms can be salvaged from defeated human troops.

The advantage a robot army would have would it be harder to kill an individual "trooper". While a human trooper can be killed by a single gunshot to the head or torso (assuming the rifle is powerful to penetrate the body armor), a robot can be redundant one single hit to a CPU would not kill it since it would have a backup "brain". Lose a leg? Make it walk on its hands as well (like a ape) or be able to self repair and reattach the leg.

What would it take to kill a basic "trooper" battle chassis? Small arms fire? Nope it had skin stronger than several sets of body armor. Concussion from blast? CPUs mounted on shock absorbers. RPGs? Allow it to use its minigun as a CIWS. Arty? Link its brain to a counter battery radar and have it fly on a jet pack out of where the shells/rockets will land. Air strike? Pack a few Stingers, it can carry the extra weight!


Also if you made the factories automated themselves and capable of gathering and refining material cost becomes meaningless, you pay once to build it and it keeps going until you tell it to stop.

Destroy the factory you say? Why not armor it with an inch or two of Depleted Uranium!

Oh and make the factory mobile...

Think of the meeting at the Pentagon when that is proposed...

Scientist: Its armor will be an inch of Depleted Uranium.
General: What! How much will that cost!
Contractor: 60 billion for the armor, automated robotic construction systems another 30, resource gathering drones another 20... per unit...
General: What will it be able to do?
Scientist: Defeat the combined armies of planet Earth...

[GoldenRivet]

fire all the missiles


get this crap over with