South Korea wants armed robots to patrol the DMZ
By Peter Rojas 
posted Apr 8th 2005 9:02PM
posted Apr 8th 2005 9:02PM
They're making it incredibly difficult for us not to make the usual round of obvious jokes, but the South Korean Defense Ministry announced plans this week to start using armed robots to patrol their border with North Korea by 2011. The goal is to eventually have enough surveillance bots in place that they can withdraw at least some of their troops from the DMZ.
"bots in place that they can withdraw at least some of their troops from the DMZ"
how can they withdraw the troops from a DEMILITARISED ZONE? they are on the edges :)
I'll call your bluff... what are the obvious jokes? Don't have any do you?
"bots in place that they can withdraw at least some of their troops from the DMZ"
how can they withdraw the troops from a DEMILITARISED ZONE? they are on the edges :)
The obvious joke is obvious - these guards have been frozen like this since 1953:
http://photos7.flickr.com/7336887_bdb4bb2b2a_o.jpg
http://photos4.flickr.com/4658531_6af73afe99_b.jpg
over 700 killed at this border (including U.S. guards) so far.
funny strange perhaps
Stuart
Well, how many bad Terminator jokes do you want to read in a single week?
I don't know why but for some reason I believe that the US will bomb the crap out of that country before 2011 :) That country and a couple looking a little bit like it, like Sweden.
Will the robots be able to fight taekwondo?
Yeah #6 it's great to be anti-American but if you read carefully, it's SOUTH Korea deploying them not the North. And if we are going to get political I think it much more likely that the South Korean government will ask the US forces to leave in the next 5-25 years. What happens when/if the North (if it still exists as a viable military entity exists) will be an interesting matter. PS I'm not from the States so think of another pathetic insult to aim, yeah?
we are gonna buy some for our DMZ... I just have to sneak them into the datacenter and then we won't have any bonehead NOC guys messin' with our "business continuity"
Erm...is North Korea the country that publicly acknowledges they have a core of military trained hackers ? And SK wants to make the firebreak between themselves and their brothers to the north consist of...machines...
Right....
Of course, pretty much all modern militaries have divisions for electronic warfare (whether they acknowledge it or not) so the situation here is not really that unique.
I stil find myself uncomfortable with arming automatons. I question how smart the AI can really be at this point. But then again, security drones are probably smarter and more discriminating than land mines, which is the other way to reduce the required manpower to guard your borders...
I just saw a prototype of these last night, they're pretty cool. They hover, are night-vision equipped, and have deadly machine guns mounted on them.
Oh wait, that was in Splinter Cell.
I wonder if they're going to name the model, "ED-209"
#4, OK-- which one's the robot?