The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons
Link to tweet
https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-inches-toward-letting-ai-control-weapons
Last August, several dozen military drones and tanklike robots took to the skies and roads 40 miles south of Seattle. Their mission: Find terrorists suspected of hiding among several buildings.
So many robots were involved in the operation that no human operator could keep a close eye on all of them. So they were given instructions to find—and eliminate—enemy combatants when necessary.
The mission was just an exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon; the robots were armed with nothing more lethal than radio transmitters designed to simulate interactions with both friendly and enemy robots.
The drill was one of several conducted last summer to test how artificial intelligence could help expand the use of automation in military systems, including in scenarios that are too complex and fast-moving for humans to make every critical decision. The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed.
*snip*
It's almost like these people have never see The Terminator.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Manned fighter aircraft will be going the way of WWI biplanes, the vaunted F35 will be obsolete within 7 years.
Those doglike robots are THIS close to becoming autonomus machine gun and bomb toting death machines.
Things are changing that fast.
What a wonderful world, eh? 
I take your point, but technology is prone to abrupt and immense acceleration, especially military tech.
A drone swarm can be effective in combat because quantity has a quality all its own, to quote Joseph Stalin.
Programing a drone swarm would actually be easier than tying to program a single aircraft to replace a human pilot because the swarm tactics can be more basic.
but OK, call it 10 years away.
Joking. Mostly, Well, not really. The future is coming fast.
Thanks for the discussion.
And you are right, those wingman jet drones are exactly the intermediate step that will have immense impact very soon. Those type of supersonic jet drones, not the toy drones people are used to seeing, are exactly what I see replacing manned fighters. No need to train pilots, capable of pulling more g-forces, probably smaller cross-section and designed to be cheaper and disposable in battle, make them inevitable. IMHO. lol
We are not actually disagreeing (much), I am just being more lighthearted about it.
Thanks for the discussion.
First, thanks for a good discussion.
But what do you define as a "long time"? Serious question. 10 years? 20? 50?
My personal belief is that AI technology will advance incredibly rapidly, making autonomous AI combat drones possible in 10 years.
I could be wrong, but remember that just prior to WWII people thought battleships would be around for a long time too.
Heck it wasn't that long ago people thought a super-computer would never beat a human grandmaster at chess or Go. Now AI engines on commercial pc's can do that.
Military technology advances incredibly fast once an arms race commences, and i believe we are entering an arms race with China.
Cheers.
The future is coming and we can't top it.
The future is what the future is.
But let's not be dissing AI as being just "complex scripts", AI is more than just that.
Hey, thinking about it, I am not sure if most of human decision making isn't just a "complex script".
