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Ban Robot Violence

[IN PROGRESS - need to add links. Sorry but I'm into participative process, please comment and help me write this! I was just thinking about this thing about robots - online or physical, or more tentacular cybernetic systems like what international corporations and/or tech companies have built up around us over the years and how it interacts with us. I felt I should come and write it down.]

There is terrible totalitarian news starting to edge it's way in to passive acceptance, from the government injustice and brutality across the world, and the international coordination of this violence (that goes all the way to the top), from that to the drones that patrol prisons and are made to kill people.

I've spent a little time working with electronics, making and conceiving of materials to make a symbiotic musical, solar, improviser bot, and programming software based bots to guide kids around a 3D reconstruction of Sydenham Crystal Palace in London (and Second Life). I learnt that through the years, robots have been acquiring the basic ability not only to be a bit overly specialised towards human interaction, but to carry out all the functions required to be considered alive, even when some of those functions are made through their relationship with us. In the case of killer or surveillance drones, their creators, the teams of scientists who work in places like and are completely insane, as are the structures who made them exist. And I wonder how many of them believe in a creator god.

There's one thing they probably don't want us to realise: We the people are the creators of robots. Everyone can join in by learning a bit of programming and electronics, and a huge DIY scene is still around making UAVs or just robots of all kinds, just from open designs - recently to film a protest.

We invented robots. Nowadays the killer robots aren't that autonomous, but they are getting there. They can mimic human behaviour in loads of ways already, but they shouldn't have to, as they are completely wonderful things, if you think that they can be made from just about anything. But soon, this intelligence, but also growth in availability of sensors and software libraries for interpreting them, means a robot will do as told and travel autonomously to kill selected people without much need for a human "pilot".

But robots shouldn't be made to do these horrible insane things. They come from our invention, from all our wonderful science that's supposedly so opposed to judeochristian religion, but that is the same white boys club, who deep down wouldn't mind a go as all powerful creator gods too. To want to not only kill you but create a robot but make it kill you more efficiently than a human in a plane or helicopter could, is psychopathic, and all the people involved in doing this should be tried for international war crimes and put under care and long term psychoanalysis for psychotic disorders. In the end though, the system as usual is to blame.

We know that it's going to be a huge crisis here on earth, with the euro falling apart and banks crashing any minute, no new fuels in sight and an environmental catastrophe after another. Some fear we really might not make it through as a human race in the slightly longer term, which has most other species sighing with relief! So if that's even a remote possibility, I imagine how the people in these companies and government departments react to that thought, wondering what their legacy might be.

Our robot brethren are whatever we make them, and we can get them not only to survive us , but be positive creatures. Maybe they will be merciless killers like in a space blockbuster, but maybe they can be ethical, positive things too, and I realise this must come from popular demand, not passive acceptance of these trends.

So I propose a ban NOW on robot violence. No robot shall ever be made, or forced to be violent to people. We owe it to them as their creator gods. And just as non-crazy people. Thank you.

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