Whatever Happened To The 4 Laws?

A new Navy report warns that war robots could go Terminator: "There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do. Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person."

Because of the sheer size of the code - typically measured in MLOCs - and many programmers working on a single robot project, it is easy to see how this could happen. I just wonder if the report isn't being too sanguine. I mean, with some cars today having nearly 100 MLOCs (see The End of Programming), isn't it likely that a war robot would need a lot more lines of code?

It seems to me that now is the time to standardize some of this stuff. For example, I can see how the military will get the most bang for the buck by off-shoring code development for the vision package, the ambulatory package, the communications package, and other types of utility packages. Maybe the armaments package needs to be done in the U.S., for security reasons.

And what about the OS? Hopefully, the M-2000 robots will be able to use the same OS as the M-1000 robots - at least without a complete rewrite. Can you imagine how long it would take a business to introduce enterprise software, if each project started with design and development of a completely new OS?

With software packages, and a standardized OS, anyone could build their own killer robots. Oh, wait...