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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.'
And personally, I'm not especially afraid the armed forces are going to change their tune on that aspect. They most definitely want to have a human being in the firing loop. And I bet part of the reason is that we may be close to having machines that can find and attack targets on their own, we're a hell of a long way from having machines that you can usefully reprimand for fucking up. :) But in all seriousness, this seems like a deeply ingrained philosophy in the military that humans should be in charge of the technology.
The enemies of Democracy are
All this air stuff is awesome, but the guys on the ground could still use a device that can detect a buried pipe bomb from a safe distance.
This is my sig.
...we've still got 75 years left!
You forgot the link
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Skynet!
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The hope has always been that if your air stuff is awesome enough, you don't need guys on the ground.
And it's been proven time and again that sooner or later there is no substitute for boots in contact with pavement. Never mind the fact that without ground support the drones are going to have a tough time figuring out what to shoot at. Little bit tough to identify Osama from 10,000 feet.
Well that explains the Starcraft II delay.... Blizzard has been busy designing interfaces for the military.
No, I don't mean Terminator.
Did anybody actually watch Stealth? I wish I could unwatch it.
[protoss voice]Carrier has arrived.[/protoss voice] *releases swarm of autonomous drones*
In future releases, this single person will be able to select a subset of these drones by clicking and dragging the mouse to form a rectangle over the desired units and assign sub-group numbers by pressing ctrl-n (where n is 1 to 9) on the keyboard. The most equipped drone will also be able to pick up ancient scrolls lost in the valleys of Afghanistan which would enhance its armor and features, such as Insightful +3 for improved vision. By the way, the command center is being built within the U.S. base in South Korea.
since the main thing limiting additional deployment of Predators is the availability of bandwidth.
He clearly doesn't know the difference between The Predator and The Terminator.
I think it's time for someone to hang up their geek spurs.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I hope those new rats don't manage to take over the networked swarm drones!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Unfortunately, the Mark 1 Eyeball can not be remotely operated.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
That's no swarm. It's a beowulf cluster.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
(get it?)
You turn it off and replace the code. Try doing the same with a human soldier, pilot, etc.
... time to get a share in the Korean Starcraft pro-gaming teams. Oh my, wars might get to be fun to watch again. =)
"Nae Kin! Nae Quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!"
While we're on the subject, let's talk about the difference between drones/UAVs and robots so we use the right words.
A drone/UAV is controlled remotely by a human. If a UAV is on autopilot flying to the target area, it is function as a robot. With the US military, there is a "man in the loop" for any attack using a UAV. The bomb disposal machines are not robots. They are remote controlled. A land mine would be closer to a robot.
A robot follows a program and is NOT controlled by a person. An air to air heat seeking missile is a robot. The software tells it what to do.
An android is a robot in the shape of a human, like the T800.
Mecha in Robotech and the like... are NOT robots. They are vehicles piloted by people. The transformers are robots that happen to be sapient. Big metal walking thing != robot. Absence of pilot inside != robot.
The machines in Battle Bots are remote controlled cars with armor and weapons. They are NOT robots. But it would be awesome if they were.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Yeah, I guess it depends on if your aim is to take the area itself or the area + civilians living in the area.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
While useful, isn't this just a larger drone with it's parts connected by signals rather than wires? Sure, it's got ablative resilience (one of three drones can go boom and you still have the rest of the formation), and more payload (more drones to cary stuff), but there doesn't seem to be any capacity for communication beyond holding formation and relaying orders from the human controller.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
I, for one, welcome our new autonomous flying overlords.
I would like to remind them that ss a programmer I can be helpful in building and maintaining your fleets of death machines.
... this for sure will broaden the semantics of hack attack.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The reason why they are calling these UAVs "swarms" is because they are using Particle Swarm Optimization to determine their flight path and schedule. (The basis for this research was done at my school, Purdue, so I know a lot about it.) The whole 'networking together' idea is not necessarily true either. The UAV's status is reported to a central machine/server/program that constantly reprocesses the incoming data to determine an optimal order of operations (such as blowing this up, looking at this, etc.) The program considers all of the situations of various other drones, in addition to other external data (wind speed, etc) to determine the optimal result.
Taken out of context, it sounds a lot like terminator type stuff, but it's not really... it's more like optimizing the operations of drones so that they can be controlled by less people.
Or the balls to use that air superiority. When used in WWII the war ended quickly.
Ending WWII was just as much due to Soviet air superiority and Soviet tank superiority as it was to US air superiority. The US didn't have tank superiority since, apart form Soviet armor, Allied armor uniformly sucked a**. A major reason the 8th air force was able to wreck the Nazi military industrial complex, and more importantly their fuel production from the air (which was easily the part of the bomber campaign that hurt the Nazi armies the most) was the fact that from 1943 onwards the Soviets managed to re-equip their forces with large numbers of modern Soviet designed fighter and bomber designs and those Soviet air forces tied down large numbers of german fighters on the eastern front. If anything defeated the Nazis it was the fact that they over-extended themselves militarily in every way.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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
Controversial? The only controversy is people who want to fly planes but are losing their jobs to video game nerds. Really...nuclear weapons is controversial....these things are just plain awesome for military personnel safety.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
Robots have bugs and glitches requiring timely patches and PRODUCT recalls. They are too complex to blame anybody and when they are free to decide more on their own much of the blame will be gone as well. It'll be like blaming microsoft for your computer sucking. bugs happen.
Blue screen of DEATH gets a new meaning.
Perhaps at this point, we'll finally get investigation on whether quality control really exists or if errors are not a form of planned obsolescence... since there would be additional incentive and a human cost (that is, in lives not wasted user time... err, literally, not metaphorically "wasted lives" troubleshooting buggy software.)
Seriously, this only illustrates how ethics and courage are not part of the empire mindset; just window dressing. This is how fat lazy cowards can take over the world. On the grander scale, its no different than traditional cultures going up against the Spanish, Romans etc- who's goal was conquest and not the honor of a risky act of sacrifice. (Relatively, from their perspective they all like to paint the situation the same way no matter how ridiculous it may appear relative to their opposition. Our military "heroes" will get undo respect for their hard job of playing a video game involving fellow humans.) For those who hadn't thought about the issues decades ago-- its about time you start to awaken to an age where human cost/risk can be ruled out for a rich aggressor - I'm not referring to leadership which has long/often been unaware but the society initiating such attacks. Americans would attack everybody if it didn't cost them anything personally; that IS the reality.
Guess the best solution is global economic entanglement...
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I can't decide if you don't get the joke, or you're trying to be facetious.
Because now, one dedicated hacker with his OLPC will be able to take down a whole army. Or even better: Make them fly back, acting as if they had been successful, landing, and then either detonating right there, or in the face of their best engineers who just before that downloaded the trojan that will now spread though the whole research facility and then report back to its master.
Man... killing is always the action of a coward. No exceptions. No sides taken.
And war is mass murder. Always. Period. No discussion about it.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
omni and directional antennas. i suppose a satellite could take over, but that seems sort of retarded to me.
It takes three people to remotely pilot a Predator. There are never enough Predators or Global Hawks in the sky for all the intelligence we would like to gather. We don't have enough people, platforms and dollars to buy, launch, pilot, and support all the reconnaissance we would like. And while the imaging capabilities on the big unmanned platforms is impressive, they still can't see through mountain ridges or down deep urban canyons. For that you need something that can fly right overhead and get close enough without being seen or heard and that requires lots of small UASs. But the only way we can get enough of those into the air is to have some way for a single person to manage two or a hundred platforms just as easily as one.
Swarm may be an unfortunate term, since it can evoke the image of a killer swarm of bees - hence we naturally think of swarms as lethal attack technology. In fact, unmanned attack swarms are still science fiction. The swarming research that is going on (and demonstrated in the article) is all about surveillance and reconnaissance. Even if we get to the point of arming the individual swarming platforms, there will always be a human in the loop making the final decision to fire a weapon. Don't kid yourself: even with all the new technology it has only gotten more difficult to make the decision to engage not easier over time. Ask those that do this for a living about the hoops they have to run through before they can fire a weapon from a Reaper.
http://xkcd.com/652/
Does this smell like Chloroform to you?
Time to re-read Daniel H. Wilson's "How to Survive a Robot Uprising"
So, instead of playing Combat Flight Sim now some lucky Corporal can play live-fire Command and Conquer?
Sounds like progress to me!
We need Ender to fly a group of the UAVs, without him it just won't be right. When will Locke and Demosthenes start blogging this?
The summary says they added "brains." I disagree, because I ambushed and tried eating on of these new drones, and I did not find it to be satisfying in the least. Quite a let down, really. Sincerely, Steve the zombie.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Voting for McCain would be ok, except that in doing so, you encouraged Palin and helped to create a monster. Personally, I had a lot more respect for McCain before the 2008 election; certainly we would have been better off if McCain instead of Bush was elected in 2000.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Former Defense policy advisor to President Obama, Peter Singer does a great interview for Hungry Beast on autonomous military robotics. Quite an interesting interview. It is a video but it won't start buffering until you hit play.
He raises a good point about us human doing things like this and then thinking 'maybe that wasn't such a good idea'. So much for Asimov's laws for robotics.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Would like to welcome our new swarm of robotic overlords. may their dark reign last a thousand years!
Good people go to bed earlier.
I see you and your space wars, and raise you a couple of thousand coke-can satellites full of ballbearings and a detonator, in low orbit