[Greg Poole @ Oct 17th 2007 6:30PM]

I can't help but feel we're doing it all wrong. Why is it that we have to take the path toward robots specifically for a military purpose, instead of ones we can use in other dangerous areas of work. Is it a sign of how we treat human life (or rather the lives of our enemies) that we would be willing to put the decision of whether or not to take it in the hands of an automaton? Why not train them to rescue people from burning buildings, or is that not as important?

[TEM @ Oct 17th 2007 8:12PM]

Greg, you're a freakin' genius! We should be building robots to rescue people from the burning buildings that our enemies blow up.

[Shaocaholica @ Oct 17th 2007 8:43PM]

No where in the article did it say that the new robot would be autonomous nor are any other battlefield robots with lethal capability autonomous. Why does this have come up every single time?

If its worth anything, soldiers lives will be saved. Perhaps in the future, since these robots will be able to take more bullets than a real human, they could be armed with less than lethal weapons but don't count on them taking away full lethal weapons.

[Greg Poole @ Oct 18th 2007 3:21AM]

Perhaps instead of condemning me for considering the negatives, TEM, you might consider why it is that our enemies would want to blow up buildings in the first place? Surely striving to research better ways to live in peace is better than trying to build a bigger and more powerful gun. Do you think that someday we'll invent the most powerful gun ever and suddenly there will be world peace? Maybe if one or the other side wins the war there'll be peace, because of course thats worked so many times in the past. If violence is the answer, then why haven't we solved the problem yet?

As for Shaocaholica, I misread the article, sorry. As for there not being any autonomous lethal robots, I beg to differ: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=2504508&page=1