A robotic anti-aircraft cannon went haywire in South Africa last week, killing nine soldiers and severely injuring fourteen more. The gun was part of a training exercise using live ammunition and was part of a row of eight identical guns aimed northward at ground targets positioned 1.5 and 2 kilometers away. Each gun is capable of firing up to 20 explosive shells in one-eighth of a second.From Capetown’s Mail& Guardian Online, Via Wired’s Danger Room:

“As all guns commenced firing, the gun on the far right … had a stoppage. This is something that happens from time to time. Technicians repaired this gun, while all the other guns continued firing. This is a very normal drill.

“As they continued firing, after the gun was fixed, it swung completely to the left, and one barrel fired off a burst of 15 to 20 shots in one-eighth of a second. The … gun immediately to the left was hit.

“This fatal burst then killed or injured members of all the guns to the left. The effect was therefore that all of those killed or injured [were hit] from the right and lost right hands, or right legs, or lost their lives.”

He confirmed the total number killed was nine, and 15 injured.

Lekota said the eight guns had been used the day before, “and each one had successfully fired between 500 and 800 rounds each”.

He further explained the guns could be set on either “manual or electric firing mode”. On the day, they had all been set on manual. This meant they were sighted on the target, and the barrel then clamped into position “so that the barrel should not move from side to side”.

“When firing in electric mode, safety boundaries are computerised and the barrels are not clamped, but move within the boundaries set in advance.”

You can read more about the story on Danger Room here.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: armed robots are the inevitable future of military and law enforcement technology, and it’s not going to be cool at all. Trusting something with that kind of firepower to the same sort of software that causes browser crashes and product outages is a bad, bad idea, and this is just the beginning.

I’m not even being paranoid here. Hunters use M-16s in America’s forests now, and you’re reading this post on the powerful outgrowth of a military experiment. Developmentally, robots now are where computers were in the late ’70s/early ’80s. They’re cool and cute, and artists are having fun with them left right and center, but they’re not all wild techno fun and games.

I don’t think this is the sky-is-falling, “Rise of the Machines” sort of incident that fellow bloggers are going to whip it into. It’s a software glitch, which happens millions of times a day. It’s just a little different when that glitch sprays bullets instead of crashes your browser, and I really don’t think arming something buggy is a good idea.

Plus, robots tend to be fairly breakable and weak at the moment. If the rise of the machines happened today, we’d be able to protect ourselves with baseball bats and Super-Soakers. But the day is coming when Verhoeven’s ED-209 is going to look a lot less funny: