War Robotic Heroes?
The Washington Post has a long and very interesting piece on robots and machines used in today’s battlefields:
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have become an unprecedented field study in human relationships with intelligent machines. These conflicts are the first in history to see widespread deployment of thousands of battle bots.
The most surprising aspect of the article is probably the description of the relationship that appears to exist between human soldiers and their robotics allies: they give them nicknames and sometimes seem to consider them as “pet dogs”, which really are “part of the team”. As the Post states it:
What the battle bots are teaching us is how easily we identify our own creations as animate. […] What’s remarkable about the battle bots is that humans bond with them even though their designers have made no attempt to load them with emotional cues.
