Fightbot 2010

Into the Valley etc…

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It was never going to be enough that the only people who got to play with these were the military – and this is this the closest thing I’ve seen to the thing I described back when I claimed I wanted to be a bird, although I did say that I want to crap on cars rather than fire rockets.

A home-made UAV that can fire rockets, with proper 1st-personism. Marvelous.

There does seem to be this Agincourt-Effect – where highly disruptive technologies do so because they make people, cheaper.

So you go from knights in armour to longbows to crossbows to guns… each successive one of these facing concerted efforts by the great and good (ie: The Aristocracy and The Pope) to be outlawed so as to preserve the prevailing order… but they’re all rapidly normalised. Now we have predators replacing jet fighters, and games-players replacing pilots and so on and so on. It’s tempting to see suicide bombers within this, but I think that’s a different process entirely.

So anyway, the Australian military appear to be doing a Robot-Wars with crowd-sourced input, by having a competition where multi-vehicle teams of autonomous robots do this and that., though as far as I can see, that doesn’t include blowing the crap out of each other. Which is a shame etc.

I seem to recall a while back someone having some sort of blowing-up-the-planet Artificial Intelligence competition… I can’t help these feeling that a large section of humanity is devotedly devoting all of their energy into creating a robotic race of super-fight-bots that will massacre us, just like Terminator 4 etc. It’s not just insane people from the military, it’s kids… backyard tinkerers… all heading towards the same point.