Robot Violence for Entertainment/STEM

As you may have noticed, I’ve posted a few tweets against programming/building robots whose primary purpose is to inflict violence on other robots.

So I’d like to explain (in >140 chars) why I’m so against it.

Techniques and program features used in such robots can directly be translated into robots designed to harm human beings.

Now, unless your planning a career with BAE systems in predator drone design, I think that is not a good use of programming talents.

And definitely not a path to encourage children to go down.

For clarity (as I’m no vegetarian/model citizen) I like watching rubgy.  Violence occurs in rugby.  I live with this as its a by-product and not the purpose of the game (which is getting ball over a line).  I don’t watch boxing.  That is my personal threshold.

Not so when humans are programming/radio-controlling violent machines with the number one purpose of disabling each others device.

In my mind – I equate this to engaging in animal fighting (without sentient beings being harmed) with owners /pit spectators having same attitude a rabid animal fighting crowd.

As a programmer/geek/engineer – I feel we can do a lot better with our talents.

So hopefully you understand that fighting robots is violence by proxy and that it crosses a threshold.

I understand that some peoples threshold may be lower/higher than mine and I can respect their views but I really take issue with someone who doesn’t actually know what I’m talking about and thinks its a non-issue.