The world's largest neuromorphic supercomputer, the Spiking Neural Network Architecture (SpiNNaker), was just switched on for the first time yesterday, boasting one million processor cores and the ability to perform 200 trillion actions per second. HotHardware reports: SpiNNaker has been twenty years and nearly $19.5 million in the making. The project was originally supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), but has been most recently funded by the European Human Brain Project. The supercomputer was designed and built by the University of Manchester's School of Computer Science. Construction began in 2006 and the supercomputer was finally turned on yesterday.

SpiNNaker is not the first supercomputer to incorporate one million processor cores, but it is still incredibly unique since it is designed to mimic the human brain. Most computers send information from one point to another through a standard network. SpiNNaker sends small bits of information to thousands of points, similar to how the neurons pass chemicals and electrical signals through the brain. SpiNNaker uses electronic circuits to imitate neurons. SpiNNaker has so far been used to mimic the processing of more isolated brain networks like the cortex. It has also been used to control SpOmnibot, a robot that processes visual information and navigates towards its targets.

MIT researchers have devised a way to train semantic parsers by mimicking the way a child learns language. "The system observes captioned videos and associates the words with recorded actions and objects," ZDNet reports, citing the paper presented this week. "It could make it easier to train parsers, and it could potentially improve human interactions with robots." From the report: To train their parser, the researchers combined a semantic parser with a computer vision component trained in object, human and activity recognition in video. Next, they compiled a dataset of about 400 videos depicting people carrying out actions such as picking up an object or walking toward an object. Participants on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to wrote 1,200 captions for those videos, 840 of which were set aside for training and tuning. The rest were used for testing. By associating the words with the actions and objects in a video, the parser learns how sentences are structured. With that training, it can accurately predict the meaning of a sentence without a video.

Engineers are building a prototype of a robotic factory that will create water, oxygen, and fuel on the surface of Mars. From a report: The year is 2038. After 18 months living and working on the surface of Mars, a crew of six explorers boards a deep-space transport rocket and leaves for Earth. No humans are staying behind, but work goes on without them: Autonomous robots will keep running a mining and chemical-synthesis plant they'd started years before this first crewed mission ever set foot on the planet. The plant produces water, oxygen, and rocket fuel using local resources, and it will methodically build up all the necessary supplies for the next Mars mission, set to arrive in another two years. This robot factory isn't science fiction: It's being developed jointly by multiple teams across NASA. One of them is the Swamp Works Lab at NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, where I am a team lead. Officially, it's known as an in situ resource utilization (ISRU) system, but we like to call it a dust-to-thrust factory, because it turns simple dust into rocket fuel. This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars -- and return to Earth to tell the story.

But why synthesize stuff on Mars instead of just shipping it there from Earth? NASA invokes the "gear-ratio problem." By some estimates, to ship a single kilogram of fuel from Earth to Mars, today's rockets need to burn 225 kilograms of fuel in transit -- launching into low Earth orbit, shooting off toward Mars, slowing down to get into Mars orbit, and finally slowing to a safe landing on the surface of Mars. We'd start with 226 kg and end with 1 kg, which makes for a 226:1 gear ratio. And the ratio stays the same no matter what we ship. We would need 225 tons of fuel to send a ton of water, a ton of oxygen, or a ton of machinery. The only way to get around that harsh arithmetic is by making our water, oxygen, and fuel on-site. Different research and engineering groups at NASA have been working on different parts of this problem. More recently, our Swamp Works team began integrating many separate working modules in order to demonstrate the entire closed-loop system. It's still just a prototype, but it shows all the pieces that are necessary to make our dust-to-thrust factory a reality. And although the long-term plan is going to Mars, as an intermediate step NASA is focusing its attention on the moon. Most of the equipment will be tried out and fine-tuned on the lunar surface first, helping to reduce the risk over sending it all straight to Mars.

In what is referred to as the "Moral Machine Experiment", a survey of more than two million people from nearly every country on the planet, people preferred to save humans over animals, young over old, and more people over fewer. From a report: Since 2016, scientists have posed this scenario to folks around the world through the "Moral Machine," an online platform hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that gauges how humans respond to ethical decisions made by artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the team behind the Moral Machine released responses from more than two million people spanning 233 countries, dependencies and territories. They found a few universal decisions -- for instance, respondents preferred to save a person over an animal, and young people over older people -- but other responses differed by regional cultures and economic status.

The study's findings offer clues on how to ethically program driverless vehicles based on regional preferences, but the study also highlights underlying diversity issues in the tech industry -- namely that it leaves out voices in the developing world. The Moral Machine uses a quiz to give participants randomly generated sets of 13 questions. Each scenario has two choices: You save the car's passengers or you save the pedestrians. However, the characteristics of the passengers and pedestrians varied randomly -- including by gender, age, social status and physical fitness. What they found: The researchers identified three relatively universal preferences. On average, people wanted: to spare human lives over animals, save more lives over fewer, prioritize young people over old ones. When respondents' preferences did differ, they were highly correlated to cultural and economic differences between countries. For instance, people who were more tolerant of illegal jaywalking tended to be from countries with weaker governance, nations who had a large cultural distance from the U.S. and places that do not value individualism as highly. These distinct cultural preferences could dictate whether a jaywalking pedestrian deserves the same protection as pedestrians crossing the road legally in the event they're hit by a self-driving car. Further reading: The study; and MIT Technology Review.

As automotive companies shift their focus to software and services in the pursuit of self-driving cars, the impact to large manufacturing cities like Detroit could be drastic. The Wall Street Journal explores this "transformation without precedent" and poses the question: will tech leave Detroit in the dust? From the report: Auto makers point out that they have one advantage that newcomers to the industry don't: vehicles. "Ultimately, you can have the best services platform there is, but if you don't have the vehicles to operate on it, that won't do you much good," said Sam Abuelsamid, a senior analyst with Navigant research. "That's where the manufacturers have an ace in the hole." Many analysts believe businesses like Uber and Alphabet's self-driving tech subsidiary Waymo won't have the appetite to get into the low-margin, capital-intensive business of car manufacturing. Some auto executives say they can hold on to their roles as hardware providers while also tapping into the growth of more-profitable services. Mr. Stackmann said VW can earn millions more customers than it currently has by offering transportation as a service through a network of connected cars. "They talk about scalability, but where is the added value from Uber?" he said. "We have a technical foundation and will build connectivity into our vehicles to connect them and our customers to our ecosystem. In the long term, the question will be: Why do you need Uber?"

Auto industry executives have long seen tech-industry threats coming. The valuation of Elon Musk's Tesla has soared in recent years, pulling even with GM's, as it has shown it can create a fiercely loyal customer base for electric cars. Google began working on autonomous-vehicle technology in 2009 and its self-driving car unit Waymo is today considered a leader in the technology. While demand for new cars and trucks remains robust and selling them will remain a core part of the industry's business in the years to come, many executives believe the long-term profit growth is limited as new forms of transportation proliferate and more car owners ditch their vehicles for shared ones, hurting sales. Car companies are trying to diversify into new business models that, much like Uber, sell transportation as a service. Revenue is generated by usage as opposed to a one-time vehicle sale, and because the service isn't as capital-intensive as building and selling cars, executives believe it can ultimately command higher margins..." The report goes on to mention the investments automobile companies are making to restructure their businesses. GM, Ford, and Toyota, for example, "are investing in new tech startups, purchasing artificial-intelligence and robotics firms, and hiring thousands of workers in tech hubs in California and Tel Aviv, Israel," reports the WSJ. "Several car companies have acquired or invested in makers of lidar, laser-based sensors that help driverless cars navigate. The auto makers are tapping the tech world for software-engineering talent, a skill traditionally in short supply in the car business."

"Over the last year, GM has taken journalists and investors through a factory in suburban Detroit, where workers plan to build self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric cars that have no steering wheels or brake pedals," reports the WSJ. "The message: It has the manufacturing might to crank out thousands of robot cars, while tech rivals like Alphabet's Waymo unit must equip their autonomous systems onto vehicles they purchase from traditional car companies."

An anonymous reader quotes Martin Monperrus, a professor of software at Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology: Repairnator is a bot. It constantly monitors software bugs discovered during continuous integration of open-source software and tries to fix them automatically. If it succeeds to synthesize a valid patch, Repairnator proposes the patch to the human developers, disguised under a fake human identity. To date, Repairnator has been able to produce 5 patches that were accepted by the human developers and permanently merged in the code base...

It analyzes bugs and produces patches, in the same way as human developers involved in software maintenance activities. This idea of a program repair bot is disruptive, because today humans are responsible for fixing bugs. In others words, we are talking about a bot meant to (partially) replace human developers for tedious tasks.... [F]or a patch to be human-competitive 1) the bot has to synthesize the patch faster than the human developer 2) the patch has to be judged good-enough by the human developer and permanently merged in the code base.... We believe that Repairnator prefigures a certain future of software development, where bots and humans will smoothly collaborate and even cooperate on software artifacts.
Their fake identity was a software engineer named Luc Esape, with a profile picture that "looks like a junior developer, eager to make open-source contributions... humans tend to have a priori biases against machines, and are more tolerant to errors if the contribution comes from a human peer. In the context of program repair, this means that developers may put the bar higher on the quality of the patch, if they know that the patch comes from a bot."

The researchers proudly published the approving comments on their merged patches -- although a conundrum arose when repairnator submitted a patch for Eclipse Ditto, only to be told that "We can only accept pull-requests which come from users who signed the Eclipse Foundation Contributor License Agreement."

"We were puzzled because a bot cannot physically or morally sign a license agreement and is probably not entitled to do so. Who owns the intellectual property and responsibility of a bot contribution: the robot operator, the bot implementer or the repair algorithm designer?"

Car enthusiast McKeel Hagerty -- also the CEO America's largest insurer of classic cars -- recently told a Detroit newspaper about his "Save Driving" campaign to preserve human driving for future generations. Hagerty said he wants people-driven cars to share the roads, not surrender them, with robot cars. "Driving and the car culture are meaningful for a lot of people," Hagerty said, who still owns the first car he bought 37 years ago for $500. It's a 1967 Porsche 911S, which he restored with his dad. "We feel the car culture needs a champion." Hagerty said he will need 6 million members to have the clout to preserve human driving in the future, but he is not alone in the quest to drum up that support. The Human Driving Association was launched in January and it already has 4,000 members. Both movements have a growing following as many consumers distrust the evolving self-driving car technology, studies show...

[S]ome people fear losing the freedom of personal car ownership and want to have control of their own mobility. They distrust autonomous technology and they worry about the loss of privacy... In Cox Automotive's Evolution of Mobility study released earlier this year, nearly half of the 1,250 consumers surveyed said they would "never" buy a fully autonomous car and indicated they did not believe roads would be safer if all vehicles were self-driving. The study showed 68 percent said they would feel "uncomfortable" riding in car driven fully by a computer. And 84 percent said people should have the option to drive themselves even in an autonomous vehicle. The study showed people's perception of self-driving cars' safety is dwindling. When asked whether the roads would be safer if all vehicles were fully autonomous, 45 percent said yes, compared with 63 percent who answered yes in 2016's study....

Proponents for self-driving cars say the cars would offer mobility to those who cannot drive such as disabled people or elderly people. They say the electric self-driving cars would be better for the environment. Finally, roads would be safer with computers driving, they say. In 2017, the United States had about 40,000 traffic deaths, about 90 percent of which were due to human error, Cox's study said.
Alex Roy, founder of the The Human Driving Association, is proposing a third option called "augmented driving" -- allowing people the option to drive, but helping them do it better.

"It's a system that would not allow a human to drive into a wall. If I turned the steering wheel toward a wall, the car turns the wheel back the right way," said Roy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Thermostats know the temperature of your house, and smart cameras and sensors know when someone's walking around your home. Smart assistants know what you're asking for, and smart doorbells know who's coming and going. And thanks to the cloud, that data is available to you from anywhere -- you can check in on your pets from your phone or make sure your robot vacuum cleaned the house. Because the data is stored or accessible by the smart home tech makers, law enforcement and government agencies have increasingly sought out data from the companies to solve crimes. And device makers won't say if your smart home gadgets have been used to spy on you. We asked some of the most well-known smart home makers on the market if they plan on releasing a transparency report, or disclose the number of demands they receive for data from their smart home devices. For the most part, we received fairly dismal responses. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson for the company said last year that it would not reveal the figures for its Echo smart speakers. Facebook said that its transparency report section will include "any requests related to Portal," its new hardware screen with a camera and a microphone. A spokesperson for the company did not comment on if the company will break out the hardware figures separately. Google also declined to comment, but did point TechCruch to Nest's transparency report. Apple, the last of the big tech giants, said that there's no need to disclose its smart home figures because there would be nothing to report, adding that user requests made to HomePod are given a random identifier that cannot be tied to a person.

TechCrunch also asked a number of smaller smart home players, like August, iRobot, Arlo, Ring, Honeywell, Canary, Samsung, and Ecobee.

New advances are taking automation to the highest end of human endeavors, offering scientists a shot at some of the most intractable problems that have confounded them -- and along the way tipping a global balance to give upstarts like China a more level playing field in the lab. From a report: A combination of artificial intelligence and nimble robots are allowing scientists to do more, and be faster, than they ever could with mere human hands and brains. "We're in the middle of a paradigm shift, a time when the choice of experiments and the execution of experiments are not really things that people do," says Bob Murphy, the head of the computational biology department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Automated science is "moving the role of the scientist higher and higher up the food chain," says Murphy. Researchers are focusing their efforts on big-picture problem-solving rather than the nitty-gritty of running experiments. He says it will also allow scientists to take on more problems at once -- and solve big, lingering ones that are too complex to tackle right now. Starting next year, Murphy's department will offer students a master's degree in automated science, the university announced last week.

"The UK Parliament caused a bit of a stir this week with the news that it would play host to its first non-human witness," reports The Verge. "A press release from one of Parliament's select committees (groups of MPs who investigate an issue and report back to their peers) said it had invited Pepper the robot to 'answer questions' on the impact of AI on the labor market." From the report: "Pepper is part of an international research project developing the world's first culturally aware robots aimed at assisting with care for older people," said the release from the Education Committee. "The Committee will hear about her work [and] what role increased automation and robotics might play in the workplace and classroom of the future." It is, of course, a stunt.

As a number of AI and robotics researchers pointed out on Twitter, Pepper the robot is incapable of giving such evidence. It can certainly deliver a speech the same way Alexa can read out the news, but it can't formulate ideas itself. As one researcher told MIT Technology Review, "Modern robots are not intelligent and so can't testify in any meaningful way." Parliament knows this. In an email to The Verge, a media officer for the Education Committee confirmed that Pepper would be providing preprogrammed answers written by robotics researchers from Middlesex University, who are also testifying on the same panel. "It will be clear on the day that Pepper's responses are not spontaneous," said the spokesperson. "Having Pepper appear before the Committee and the chance to question the witnesses will provide an opportunity for members to explore both the potential and limitations of such technology and the capabilities of robots." MP Robert Halfon, the committee's chair, told education news site TES that inviting Pepper was "not about someone bringing an electronic toy robot and doing a demonstration" but showing the "potential of robotics and artificial intelligence." He added: "If we've got the march of the robots, we perhaps need the march of the robots to our select committee to give evidence."

In a new video from robotics company Boston Dynamics, which Alphabet sold to SoftBank last year, a robot is shown hopping over a log and then up a series of blocks, an activity called parkour. From a report: In previous videos, the robot did a backflip -- now it's leaping over obstacles and climbing up large, uneven stairs with fleet-footed ease. But Atlas wasn't always so graceful. In some of the first videos where Boston Dynamics' robots could walk upright, way back in 2015, Atlas lumbered through the woods, looking like it was narrowly avoiding falling with each step, rather than moving with any kind of purpose.

Japanese retailer Uniqlo in Tokyo's Ariake district has managed to cut 90% of its staff and replace them with robots that are capable of inspecting and sorting the clothing housed there. The automation also allows them to operate 24 hours a day. Quartz reports: The company recently remodeled the existing warehouse with an automated system created in partnership with Daifuku, a provider of material handling systems. Now that the system is running, the company revealed during a walkthrough of the new facility, Uniqlo has been able to cut staff at the warehouse by 90%. The Japan News described how the automation works: "The robotic system is designed to transfer products delivered to the warehouse by truck, read electronic tags attached to the products and confirm their stock numbers and other information. When shipping, the system wraps products placed on a conveyor belt in cardboard and attaches labels to them. Only a small portion of work at the warehouse needs to be done by employees, the company said."

The Tokyo warehouse is just a first step in a larger plan for Uniqlo's parent company, Fast Retailing. It has announced a strategic partnership with Daifuku with the goal of automating all Fast Retailing's brand warehouses in Japan and overseas. Uniqlo plans to invest 100 billion yen (about $887 million) in the project over an unspecified timeframe. (The Japan News reported that it costs about 1 billion to 10 billion yen to automate an existing warehouse.) Uniqlo believes the system will help it minimize storage costs and, importantly, deliver products faster around the world. The company has set a target of 3 trillion yen (about $26.6 billion) in annual revenue. Last year its revenue was about 1.86 trillion yen (pdf).

Jason Koebler writes: Do Not Pay, a free service that launched in the iOS App store today, uses artificial intelligence to help people win up to $25,000 in small claims court. It's the latest project from 21-year-old Stanford senior Joshua Browder, whose service previously allowed people to fight parking tickets or sue Equifax; now, the app has streamlined the process. It's the "first ever service to sue anyone (in all 3,000 counties in 50 states) by pressing a button."

Google on Tuesday unveiled the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, its latest flagship Android smartphones. "For life on the go, we designed the world's best camera and put it in the world's most helpful phone," said Google's hardware chief Rick Osterloh. From a report: The Pixel 3 starts at $799 for 64GB, with the 3 XL costing $899. Add $100 to either for the 128GB storage option. Core specs for both include a Snapdragon 845, 4GB RAM (there's no option for more), Bluetooth 5.0, and front-facing stereo speakers. Also inside is a new Titan M security chip, which Google says provides "on-device protection for login credentials, disk encryption, app data, and the integrity of the operating system." Preorders for both phones begin today, and buyers will get six months of free YouTube Music service.

The Pixel 3 and 3 XL both feature larger screens than last year's models thanks to slimmed down bezels -- and the controversial notch in the case of the bigger phone. The 3 XL has a 6.3-inch display (up from six inches on the 2 XL), while the regular 3 has a 5.5-inch screen (up from five inches). Overall, though, the actual phones are very similar in size and handling to their direct predecessors. Google has stuck with a single rear 12.2-megapixel camera on both phones, continuing to resist the dual-camera industry trend. But it's a different story up front. Both the Pixel 3 and 3 XL have two front-facing cameras; one of them offers a wider field of view for getting more people or a greater sense of your surroundings into a selfie. [...] A new Top Shot option will select the best image from a burst series of shots. Like Samsung's Galaxy Note 9, it will weed out pictures that are blurry or snaps where someone blinked. Super Res Zoom uses multiple frames and AI to deliver a sharper final photo even without optical zoom. There's another interesting feature on the new Pixel handsets: To help you avoid calls from scammers, Google is adding Call Screen to the Pixel, a new option that appears when you receive a phone call. Whenever someone calls you, you can tap a "Screen call" button, and a robot voice will pick up. "The person you're calling is using a screening service, and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name, and why you're calling," the Google bot will say. As the caller responds, the digital assistant will transcribe the caller's message for you. If you need more information, you can use one of the feature's canned responses, which include, "Tell me more," and "Who is this?" There is an accept and reject call button that's on-screen, so you can hang up or take the call at any time.

Rethink Robotics led the way in building robots that could work safely alongside humans. But when it came to selling those robots, Boston-based Rethink came up second best. On Wednesday, without warning, Rethink shut its doors, after a deal to acquire the company fell through. From a report: "We thought that we had a deal that we were going to be able to close," said Rethink chief executive Scott Eckert. But the buyer backed out. Eckert declined to identify the company that had broken off the acquisition. Eckert said Rethink ran low on cash as sales of the company's Baxter and Sawyer robots fell short of expectations. "We got out a little early with a very, very innovative product, and unfortunately did not get the commercial success that we expected to get," he said. Rethink was a pioneer in developing collaborative robots, or "cobots," which are designed to work side-by-side with humans. Their software makes them easy to program, even by workers with no training in robotics, and they come with sensors and software to prevent them from accidentally harming nearby humans.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Iron Ox isn't like most robotics companies. Instead of trying to flog you its technology, it wants to sell you food. As the firm's cofounder Brandon Alexander puts it: "We are a farm and will always be a farm." But it's no ordinary farm. For starters, the company's 15 human employees share their work space with robots who quietly go about the business of tending rows and rows of leafy greens. Today Iron Ox is opening its first production facility in San Carlos, near San Francisco. The 8,000-square-foot indoor hydroponic facility -- which is attached to the startup's offices -- will be producing leafy greens at a rate of roughly 26,000 heads a year. That's the production level of a typical outdoor farm that might be five times bigger. The opening is the next big step toward fulfilling the company's grand vision: a fully autonomous farm where software and robotics fill the place of human agricultural workers, which are currently in short supply. Iron Ox uses software, dubbed "The Brain," to watch over the farm and monitor nitrogen levels, temperature, and robot location. Alexander hopes to automative every process of the farm, but human workers are currently needed to help with seeding and processing the crops. He cites the shortage of agricultural workers and the distances that fresh product currently has to be shipped for reasons why we need automated farming.

"The problem with the indoor [farm] is the initial investment in the system," says Yiannis Ampatzidis, an assistant professor of agricultural engineering at the University of Florida. "You have to invest a lot up front. A lot of small growers can't do that." Currently, Iron Ox is sending the food it produces to a local food bank and to the company salad bar.

Mark Graham, the Director of Wayback Machine at Internet Archive, announces: As part of the Internet Archive's aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable -- and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine.

For more than 5 years, the Internet Archive has been archiving nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed at the rate of about 20 million URLs/week. And for the past 3 years, we have been running a software robot called IABot on 22 Wikipedia language editions looking for broken links (URLs that return a '404', or 'Page Not Found'). When broken links are discovered, IABot searches for archives in the Wayback Machine and other web archives to replace them with. Restoring links ensures Wikipedia remains accurate and verifiable and thus meets one of Wikipedia's three core content policies: 'Verifiability.'

Long time reader theodp writes: Facebook last week announced the launch of CodeFWD, "a free online education program created in partnership with [robotic toy maker] Sphero to increase the amount of underrepresented and female students interested in studying computer science." Sphero and CodeFWD are offering a free Sphero BOLT Power Pack (a classroom set of 15 robots valued at $2,499) for a select number of accepted applicants through the program. So, what do you need to begin CodeFWD by Facebook? "No experience necessary. No experience preferred ," explains the website. However, that's not to say CodeFWD is for all. "CodeFWD is intended for educators who are credentialed K-12 teachers or 501(c)(3) non-profit staff members in the United States," the website makes clear, adding that "given the limited supply of robots, we will evaluate the information you've provided and prioritize those applications that help us achieve the goal of expanding access to computer programming opportunities." And Facebook, being Facebook, adds that it wants some data out of the deal: "Please note that Facebook will have access to aggregate, anonymous usage data from Sphero, but will not have access to user-identifiable data collected by Sphero."

"Imagine an artificial-intelligence-driven military drone capable of autonomously patrolling the perimeter of a country or region and deciding who lives and who dies, without a human operator. Now do the same with tanks, helicopters and biped/quadruped robots." A United Nations conference recently decided not to ban these weapons systems outright, but to revisit the topic in November.

So a MarketWatch columnist looked at how these weapons systems could go bad -- and argues the risks are greater than simply fooling the AI into malfunctioning. What about hijacking...? In warfare, AI units can function autonomously, but in the end they need a way to communicate with one another and to transfer data to a command center. This makes them vulnerable to hacking and hijacking. What would happen if one of these drones or robots was hijacked by an opposite faction and started firing on civilians? A hacker would laugh. Why? Because he wouldn't hijack just one. He would design a self-propagating virus that would spread throughout the AI network and infect all units in the vicinity, as well as those communicating with them. In a split second, an entire squad of lethal autonomous weapons systems would be under enemy control... Every machine can be overridden, tricked, hijacked and manipulated with an efficiency that's unheard of in the realm of human-operated traditional weaponry.

However, the U.S. government remains oblivious. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has already announced a $2 billion development campaign for the next wave of technologically advanced AI (dubbed "AI Next"). One of the goals is to have the machines "acquire human-like communication and reasoning capabilities, with the ability to recognize new situations and environments and adapt to them." I may be overreaching here, but the UN meeting on one end and this announcement on the other, make me think that the U.S. government isn't just pro-robotic -- it may already have a lethal autonomous weapons ace up its sleeve.
The article ends with a question: What do you think about killer robots replacing human combatants?

And what would happen if killer robots got hijacked?

An anonymous reader shares a report: While Americans still wrangle their overgrown lawns by pushing or riding a lawnmower, many Europeans have handed off that responsibility to robots. These beefy, Roomba-like mowers loop their way around a yard, keeping grass trim and neat. To many of their users, the bots are endearing. Their owners give them names or cover them in decals of ladybugs or bumblebees. But the sentimentality only goes so far, because these blades-on-wheels have also been slicing up something other than grass: hedgehogs.

Erika Heller, a long-time hedgehog advocate with a Swiss nonprofit called Igelstation Winterthur, estimates that nearly half the hedgehogs brought to the group during the last couple years were injured by robot lawnmowers. These injuries include limb amputation, cut bellies, or even scalping. And that's not including the ones that have been killed outright. "The ones that have died we don't see, because they don't get brought here." In the United States, despite a wealth of children's toys and clothing featuring hedgehogs, the only live animals you're likely to see are in the zoo or, more controversially, kept as pets. But in Europe, wild hedgehogs are beloved. They're popular in European folklore; there's even a famous British poem about a hedgehog killed by a lawn mower.