Slashdot Mirror
Rise of the Robot Squadrons
Velcroman1 writes 'Taking a cue from the Terminator films, the US Navy is developing unmanned drones that network together and operate in 'swarms.' Predator drones have proven one of the most effective — and most controversial — weapons in the military arsenal. And now, these unmanned aircraft are talking to each other. Until now, each drone was controlled remotely by a single person over a satellite link. A new tech, demoed last week by NAVAIR, adds brains to those drones and allows one person to control a small squadron of them in an intelligent, semiautonomous network.'
When you watch the precision of the people flying Predators and Reapers, one wonders what would be the incentive to give the machines more autonomy.
There have been armed UAV's that have gone off the reservation and failed to respond to commands or their default programming, which tells them to fly home.
I'm not sure we want to give something with that kind of bomb load more latitude. You could maybe automate the actual flying, let the auto-pilot handle the aircraft control but I'm not really seeing the motivation to drive the technology too far beyond that.
Now for reconnaissance I could see driving the autonomy envelope. Because that's largely repetitive and boring as all get out. And, if something goes wrong, you don't have a full load of ordnance crashing into some politically charged civilian target. Ironically Predators first mission was recon, then someone got the big idea to hang a couple Hellfire's on the wings and that's how we got where we are today.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Am I the only one who's worried that if and when we get into a shooting war against a country who's military is primarily goat-based they'll have hacked these things and just shut them all off? Or jam them, or worse, turn them against us? Especially the jamming and just shutting them all of parts. Are these electronics using parts made in China? Is there a windows operating system connected to the network that's connected to the network, that runs these things? The next uber-botnet is going to allow you to not only send male enhancement spam but to slaughter civilians with your own army of predator drones? (Also, obligatory skynet reference and COOL)