Should the teaching robots, like ATLAS, Martial Arts be illegal?

Question

Watching the various robot videos today, such as the Boston D. choreography - it came to me that teaching them martial arts is going to be a really interesting topic to watch/discuss.Have any orgs already been talking about this?A work around to this is 'allowing' the robot to learn from any movement it sees and determine how to mimic it, then send it to various martial arts tourneys, or have it watch every martial arts movie ever made, then it can share what it has learned with its comrades... or just have it subscribe to a robot-movement skynet account, and it will have access to any and all movements every other movement in the colony has ever learned...Yeah, we are fucked.Wait until the robots learn how create tools to use between all members of the colony themselves. Like the ability to review all failures in movement/action and derive the solution, then that enters skynet---On another note, I was thinking, while watching the Unitree A1 unboxing, that the ultimate weapon against it is a powerful 'paintball' gun with pellets filled with super-strong, ultra-quick-setting opaque epoxies.Shoot at joints and cameras, if stationary maybe the feet.Thoughts?

LinuxBender · Accepted Answer

Just my two cents. Logistics of current tech aside, I think it is a bit premature to make such specific laws. I am not a lawyer, but I could see using existing laws to prosecute a person or company that builds something with the intention of harming others, assuming it was not sanctioned by a government to do so. If the device malfunctions and accidentally harms someone, then I would expect the existing legal framework to deal with that as well. If your Tesla gets hacked by some kid and your car mows people down there would be an investigation and if a root cause is found, the existing legal framework should be able to deal with this. If an interstate fuel pipeline control framework is hacked and fuel supplies are shut down ... well you get the picture, this is already a potential risk in all current tech. So bring on the Ninja robots and just make sure nobody can hack into it and that it has fail-safes in place to prevent unauthorized harm. Authorized being the level permitted in a martial arts tournament or that of a personal security detail... Perhaps another angle of this would be what type and amount of liability insurance you are required to carry for such a device especially if it is allowed outside of a very controlled and secured environment.
I could see laws and more specifically rights for systems that become sentient. If something becomes self aware and/or a life-form then I think we would need to give it protections not afforded machines. [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjuQRCG_sUw

PaulHoule · Answer

The fantasy weapon to kill something like that is a pulse laser or hypervelocity kinetic gun that produces a plasma explosion exceeding 30,000 K on the surface of the thing.
The plasma explosion creates an electromagnetic pulse exactly the same way that an atom bomb does, but it happens right on the casing of the thing and has a stronger effect.
That kind of electromagnetic pulse can directly trigger nerves to cause pain and a "stunning" effect, which together with the impact of the expanding fireball can have a knockdown effect. Somebody from Sandia National Labs told me about this possibility circa 1992, but research got stopped on it circa 2006 when it got out that it could cause pain without tissue damage and they might be zapping people with it at Gitmo.

smoldesu · Answer

I'll take the bait. I used to drive for an FRC team, and we'd write demo programs similar to (but much less impressive than) Boston Dynamic's demos. Those demos are static though, and have a limited degree to which they can react to outside intervention. The field of inverse kinematics has a long ways to go before we need to be worried about this sort of thing.