Artificial Intelligence (AI) has long been seen as the answer to many of life’s evolutions, but the question of injecting an autonomous brain into an unknown being has yet to be fully achieved. But this vision could be one step closer to becoming reality, with the development of a gun turret which has the ability to track targets without the need for human interaction.
The weaponry in question has been developed in the city of Daejeon, South Korea by an arms manufacturer who has designed and built a gun turret that’s able to identify, track and shoot targets, theoretically without the need for human mediation. Below is an image which conveys this piece of kit, it packs 50 calibre bullets which is enough fire power to incapacitate a truck The Robot gun has a range of some 4 kilometres which to put into perspective is over 2 miles. it looks like an angry K9.
The gun turret is already being implemented in numerous locations in the Middle East, including three airbases in the United Arab Emirates (Al Dhafra, Al Safran and Al Minad)
While impressive, this technical combat gun raises questions regarding the future, if you fully automate a gun which is able to theoretically decide to shoot someone, you would certainly need a radical re think of the programming behind such decision. The ability to provide refined ethics in a situation is unique to the development over millions of years of the human brain.
Look at it this way, if a child was spotted by the robot walking towards say a group of people while holding a replica gun which in fact is a toy. Will said machine be able to correctly inform itself and hold fire? Or will it compare a toy gun to that if an actual firearm before opening fire. As a gun turret cannot arrest someone, owning to the fact of no arms or legs, will it just shoot everytime it senses danger?
Until AI can fully comprehend all emotions correctly within the laws which govern life’s decisions, I would be extremely wary of automating a gun which can decide who to shoot.
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