Roombas of Doom & the Noisy ‘Big Dog’

The video above is The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee visiting with Colin Angle, the CEO and co-founder of Roomba maker, iRobot. Angle says, “it’s inevitable that there will be armed robots.” His company is set to receive $286 million to build some.

The other day I embedded video of the Boston Dynamics “Big Dog” war robot. As counterpoint, I quoted P. W. Singer from a January 22 Fresh Air interview. His book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, looks at the ethical dilemmas of robotics in warfare.

Today I listened to a podcast of a Feb 17, 2009 speech Singer gave at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School. Singer says the war robots we’re seeing now are the equivalent of the Model T Ford. The state of the art today is about where computers were in 1980:

They’re somewhat bulky. They’re mainly used by the military. There’s a limited set of applications. But they’re ready for a take-off.

One area Singer says is still a technological obstacle is “quiet power.” His example is the Big Dog:

It looks like a horse without a head on it… On one hand scientists are amazed by it because it’s able to walk on its own. Incredibly efficiently, better than a human could…. The flip side is the Big Dog is really loud right now. It sounds like a lawn mower. So if you’re trying to sneak up on an enemy, a lawn mower coming at you is a pretty good indicator.

Singer quotes a survey of scientists and military people who were asked how long it will take to have “humanoid equivalent” infantrymen. Scientists, on average, answered the year 2020. The military people said 2025.

He notes that either date is closer than when most of us will have our mortgages paid off.