Military Robots Expected To Outnumber Troops By 2023

Lucas123 writes "Autonomous robots programmed to scan city streets with thermal imaging and robotic equipment carriers created to aid in transporting ammunition and other supplies will likely outnumber U.S. troops in 10 years, according to robotic researchers and U.S. military officials. 5D Robotics, Northrop Grumman Corp., QinetiQ, HDT Robotics and other companies demonstrated a wide array of autonomous robots during a display at Ft. Benning in Georgia last month. The companies are already gaining traction in the military. For example, British military forces, use QinetiQ's 10-pound Dragon Runner robot, which can be carried in a backpack and then tossed into a building or a cave to capture and relay surveillance video. 'Robots allow [soldiers] to be more lethal and engaged in their surroundings,' said Lt. Col. Willie Smith, chief of Unmanned Ground Vehicles at Fort Benning, Ga. 'I think there's more work to be done but I'm expecting we'll get there.'"

Comments

Skynet

[FlyHelicopters]

I, for one, welcome our new Skynet overlord...

Re:Skynet

[dmbasso]

I wouldn't be so worried if the mind behind the controls were a completely autonomous AI... actions against innocent people would probably be caused by some pattern matching glitch or whatever.

But with humans on command, the probability of it being used with malicious intent is much higher. You frogs are getting worried about the water temperature, with lots of local police forces getting militarized and stuff... get ready for when these babies start to get deployed locally, to "defend you against the terrorists."

Re:Skynet

[amiga3D]

It's very easy to avoid war. Simplicity itself. Don't fight. When someone comes and says we want to take everything you have and enslave you then just say "okay." No problem. It doesn't get any easier than that. Personally I believe there are a lot of things worse than war. Worse even than dying.

Is this really a _good_ idea?

[beh]

This is not to say that it'll be hard to stop the proliferation of military robots, but - is this really a good idea?

Sure, us Westerners, we can say how good a thing this may be - on the other hand, Gaddafi had some problems after a while with his troops seeing the misery they were spreading. To some extent, the same is true for Assad's Syria..

Can you picture what would happen, if rulers like those got their hands on military robots that will just unquestioningly mow down their own people, if the people don't like their "esteemed" ruler any more?

Or - picture them in the hands of North Korea...

Once they get deployed in one nation, no matter how well "behaved" that one nation will be, they will appear in other places - under less enlightened "leadership".

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[FlyHelicopters]

This is not to say that it'll be hard to stop the proliferation of military robots, but - is this really a good idea?

No, it isn't... You aren't thinking big enough. What happens when the robots decide they don't want to fight?

Yea, all silly sci-fi crap, right? That could never happen, right?

67 years separated the Wright Brother's first airplane flight that lasted 12 seconds and went 120 feet from Neil Armstrong landing on the moon.

If you had run around in 1904 (the year after the first flight) yelling that man would walk on the moon within a lifetime, you would have been locked up as a crazy person.

Well lock me up then, because giving guns to robots is about the stupidest thing we could *ever* do.

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[LordLimecat]

No, it isn't... You aren't thinking big enough. What happens when the robots decide they don't want to fight?

We can worry about that when we have robots that can make decisions. We're pretty far from that right now, so I dont think we have to worry about it.

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[FlyHelicopters]

Define: "Pretty far"

Or did you skip the rest of my post? :)

Sooner or later, machines will figure out how to program themselves. Call it self-awareness or whatever you want, but as soon as a computer can alter its own programming, it can decide to refuse to fight, or perhaps turn against its creator.

Does it really matter if that time is 20 years from now or 40 years? Or 60 years?

Do we really want to give them all weapons?

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is true that robots will have even fewer scruples than riot cops. On the plus side, what machines lack in virtue, they also lack in vice. Unless so instructed, I'd expect minimal recreational killing of civilians, raping, looting, or other eminently human behavior that a machine wouldn't really be interested in. They would also have the advantage (or disadvantage, if you prefer to hide behind 'fog of war' inevitability arguments) of obeying instructions about risk aversion vs. collateral damage avoidance.

All sensors, human or machine, are imperfect, and will generate false negatives and false positives; but, if a human gets nervous enough, or loses a few squadmates, or similar, it will be very difficult indeed to keep is aversion to false negatives from overriding any concern about false positives. Robots, given the present state of machine vision, aren't as accurate as humans; but they know neither fear, nor loss, nor hate, and will obediently accept any level of risk aversion: from 'return fire only, and only against hostiles unaccompanied by neutral or unknown parties, self preservation is secondary.' to 'If it moves, kill it until it stops.'

The unpleasant truth is that, the occasional moral hero aside, getting usefully high levels of brutality out of humans just isn't wildly difficult, and we've been refining our technique since the dawn of recorded history. The major advantage that robots do bring to the field is that, should the situation start to turn against you, they aren't going to revolt like unpaid and underfed soldiers tend to, they'll just break down from lack of maintenance, rather than marching on your palace and delivering your head to the angry mob outside.

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[RsG]

It actually wouldn't be that difficult to avoid what you describe as "silly sci-fi crap" scenarios. The key concept is autonomy.

Meatbag infantry aren't that autonomous to begin with. They need their supply lines; an army marches on its stomach. And they need orders. For every squad of grunts shooting/getting shot at there's a legion of grunts keeping them in ammo, food, water and fuel, bare minimum, and and whole line of dummies (excuse me, officers) telling them where to go and what to do. Interrupt either and they stop being effective in a hurry.

Despite these limits infantry are still the MOST autonomous branch of the military. Tanks need entire shops for of full time specialists, aircraft spend more time getting fixed than getting flown, and ships go through fuel by the tanker.

A super advanced drone with onboard guidance still needs fuel, and if it wants to kill anyone, ammo. And it'll probably need a direct order, possibly with an access code, to unlock its weapons, seeing as ROE are already that restrictive for human soldiers.

And the kinds of traits your talking about in an advanced computer - self-determination, intellectual autonomy, freedom - are the polar OPPOSITE of what the military wants in a drone. If Cyberdyne made a pitch to the Pentagon that started with "Our new T800 Killbots are able to learn, think and adapt", they wouldn't make it halfway through the first PowerPoint slide before getting politely asked to leave. Top brass don't even want regular grunts doing any of those things.

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The one exception (though it would take considerable...pressure... for such a concept to make it to anywhere but the bottom shelf of DARPA's toy chest, much less mass-deployment) might be area denial mechanisms. With presently available technology, the only area denial strategies we can pull off are being cheap, quiet, and dangerously persistent (land mines, slow-evaporating chemical agents), with some limited 'autonomy' if you count human manipulation of organisms (spore-forming bacteria, say, like anthrax, can persist for years or decades in soil; but also reproduce in denser populations.)

Area denial gear has a very, very, nasty reputation, and you'd need technology on the verge of being biology-by-other-means to pull it off with robots; but I suspect that somebody would buy a few batches of air-droppable hunter/killer bots that would sneak around wreaking havoc until a suitably cryptographically signed 'stand-down' order were broadcast, if anybody had the ability to sell such a thing.

As said, such a thing would be crazy difficult to pull off, and actually using them would make you deeply unpopular; but they'd sell.

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I don't doubt that a robot could be made to exhibit such desires (unless you throw your lot in with the Cartesian dualists, anything a human can do a sufficiently complex robot could do); but I do doubt that anyone with purely pragmatic uses for robots (as opposed to AI researchers trying to pass Turing tests), would want such 'features'.

People consider the IT department enough of a drain as it is, just imagine what a mess it would be if you had to add a bunch of computational psychologists and computer systems therapists to the mix...

Re:Is this really a _good_ idea?

[ColdWetDog]

Ah, you just touched on the Achilles's heel - the power source. No nucs, no majic fuel cell sipping hydrogen from the air.

It's gonna be batteries all the way down.... to zero.

Tomorrow's war

[meteormarc]

Robots will be excellent in fighting the human bodies of today's terrorists. But how will we defend ourselves against robot warriors of terrorist organizations? The old story: we arm ourselves for todays war and are blind for the future. Dutch politics has been discussing the Joint Strike Fighter for more than 10 years. They end up replacing 60+ F16 jets for a mere 34 JSF jets costing billions of dollars and will not see their limitations.

Re:We don't have one robot soldier yet.

[FlyHelicopters]

No, no it really isn't...

http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20081110/crispin-a.shtml

They aren't ready for prime time, but the day is coming.

Or have you never heard of a Predator Drone firing a Hellfire missile?

Wait, there's more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOuH_X3lFMU

And

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOuH_X3lFMU

Yea, they look silly today, but then so did the first tanks and airplanes in 1914.

It won't happen in 5 years, but it will happen within 50 years. Give or take...

Soon, China will be manufacturing them

[Animats]

The scary thought is Chinese industry manufacturing a few billion of them. Not big humanoids like the Atlas, or walking trucks like Big Dog. More like huge numbers of little quadrotors and insect to mouse sized machines to snoop around.

Re:Soon, China will be manufacturing them

[drinkypoo]

Huge numbers of little quadrotors, each with a tiny shaped charge and produced at a nominal cost of thirty bucks. Using swarm intelligence, and swarm tactics. Built using toy technology. They don't have to be good if you have enough of them

Re:We don't have one robot soldier yet.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

So far, we're pretty much using them as cameras. It's a bit of a jump to say they will start replacing soldiers.

catcha: Replacer they must plan these things

How sophisticated does a guidance system have to be before it qualifies as a (rather suicidal) robotic soldier?

While there seems to be a bit of a taboo about handing a robot a gun and telling it 'yeah, just frag anything that looks particularly infrared in that direction', heat-seeking missiles, with no human terminal guidance, have been available for years.

We don't have anything that makes broader strategic decisions; but if you count robots attached to their munitions, we've been letting robots make kill decisions, within a confined search space, autonomously for some time. They just don't get to come back afterward.

Reduction of reluctance to war

[Alain Williams]

Today: a general might want to engage in some madcap but risky adventure but will be restrained because he knows that his ass will get it if too many of his own soliders die. This reluctance preserves life on both sides of the war.

Tomorrow: that general will do it since he knows that his bosses won't weep much over the loss of a few robots and not at all over the many deaths on the other side -- be they soldiers or civilians. The result will be a loosening of moral constraints to kill, not a good thing by my way of thinking.

We saw that a century ago when it did not matter to the generals how many of their own side died, remember the huge numbers who died in the Battle of the Somme and the deaths from drone attaks in Pakistan that few in the West worry about.

Re:What was the point of waging wars again?

[cusco]

What kind of idiot wants an inexperienced virgin? Send me to 75 horny sluts and I might consider signing up.

Re:We don't have one robot soldier yet.

[cusco]

It only took 50 years to go from Eniac to mult-core processor with gigabytes of memory accessing data from around the entire planet on every desktop.

It's ironic, too...

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ... Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing. ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ..."