Robotic gun opened fire on her

The tragic incident overshadowed the course of the annual exercises of the air defense forces of the army of the Republic of South Africa, held in the training center near the town of Lohatla in the Northern Province of the country. The national newspaper Star reports that on October 12, the Olylikon GDF-005 automatic computerized gun ( Oerlikon GDF-005 ) unexpectedly opened indiscriminate fire at the location of the battery, which consisted of five similar cannons. Before all 500 explosive cartridges of caliber 35 mm ended in its stores, it managed to injure 23 people, of whom 9 were fatal.

This tool is the development of the Swiss company Oerlikon Contraves AG, which was first shown to the public in the 80s and has since been used in more than 30 countries of the world. Its main feature is an outstanding digital aiming and control system using a radar and a laser rangefinder for precise aiming. In fact, the participation of a person for hitting a target with this tool is not required; he only pulls the trigger when its capture and guidance is carried out in fully automatic mode.

For an unclear reason, when the battery had just started an exercise in firing real ammunition, the "enraged" gun began to rotate feverishly, sending projectiles throughout its entire radius of firing. The heroic attempts of an unnamed female officer to disable the gun control of an autonomous computer did not lead to success. The names of the dead are not reported yet, until their relatives are notified.
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Experts who took part in the testing of the fire control system of this gun say that such “behavior” of military robots, which actually are so highly automated weapons, is rarely, but regularly encountered. The reasons for the current tragedy are yet to be clarified, but there is no reason to doubt that with the ever-increasing computerization of weapons, such cases will occur more often.