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How the Pentagon's Robots Would Automate War
rossgneumann writes: Pentagon officials are worried that the U.S. military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China, and are willing to explore almost anything to stay on top—including creating robots capable of becoming fighting machines. A 72-page document throws detailed light on the far-reaching implications of the Pentagon's plan to monopolize imminent "transformational advances" in biotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence, information technology, nanotechnology, and energy.
But Skynet-1 vs Skynet-2, and humans are just the collateral damage.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
This proposal is rubbish, where does it say anything about "think of the children"
Is he saying we might end up in a fight with [China|Russia]?
Because if he is not then we'd be better served spending that money trying to stabilize the mid-east. And re-building our own infrastructure.
... robots.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Think of an EMP as a beam weapon....
Those that the US wants to fight with robots will just do the same and everybody will be a lot less safe as a result. These people are incapable of learning from history and just make the same dumb and expensive mistakes over and over again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Indeed. Fear and paranoia are often the main ingredients to colossal disasters.
USA's post-9/11 fears drove us to invade Iraq for no decent reason whatsoever, and create a power-vacuum that haunts us and the Middle East to this day. Saddam may have been a jerk, but he served to stabilize other jerks (Iran gov't, ISIS, etc.). We upset the Balance of Jerks (we lost Jerk Jenga).
"Let's throw Terminators at the problem. What can possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong..."
Table-ized A.I.
You have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place... The only beneficiary is the MIC, at the expense of everybody else.
How many more movies does Hollywood have to churn out before we get the message that this is a bad idea?
I'm not reading 72 pages of military sales pitches, but I do challenge this assertion:
Pentagon officials are worried that the U.S. military is losing its edge compared to competitors like China
That sounds like complete BS.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
THANK GOODNESS the Chinese haven't shown themselves capable of hacking our military's systems!
#DeleteChrome
Soon other nations will do the same and have their army of robots too. Will robot vs robot wars prevent human deaths?
One can go to great ones ordering atrocities when they can be completely certain that their armed forces are programmed never to turn against them.....
It's not Skynet we need to be afraid of.
It's the people declaring "enemy combatants", "insurgents" and "collateral" to be non-human and completely valid targets.
In the "news" (not in fact), there was a claimed missile gap between the US and the USSR. This blew up (pun intended) just before the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, and helped Kennedy get elected. Kennedy blamed Nixon, who was Vice President during the previous Eisenhower administration, of being responsible for this failure.
In fact, the estimates about the number of Soviet ICBMs were grotesquely exaggerated.
So they were claiming over a hundred in two years, while the real number at the time was four.
In Kubricks's film Dr. Strangelove, this was parodied as a mineshaft gap
So in a time of shrinking budgets, when a Pentagon general gets up on a podium and screams "were falling behind, we need more money NOW!!!", maybe you should examine his claims very carefully. The Pentagon is not exactly a disinterested party. There is a lot of recent history suggesting he might not be right.
Why is Snark Required?
... where will the incentive for peace come from?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots."
You can't handle the truth.
...welcome our new military robotic overlords, SIR!
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Why fool with building robots and junk to fight each other? Let's just take the next step and follow the original Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon" and let computer software decide who gets killed in simulated wars. Would save tons of money!
Or you know, we could just try being peaceful with each other. The relative world peace we've enjoyed since WW2 has been nice. Sure there's been small wars here and there, but overall we've been pretty well behaved and civil with each other. Let's work improving that?
1. "how the Pentagon's": not China's, not Russia's. 2. "...robots would..." not Could or Should but Would. 3. "...Automate War..." and not anything else. 4. bottom line: robots can now, or will later, surpass every skill you have. sports, medicine, and soon...innovation (or, at least, the inno that gets paid.)
Those that the US wants to fight with robots will just do the same and everybody will be a lot less safe as a result.
I am not sure I understand your logic. Are you saying that our enemies will refrain from using robots unless we go first?
The real trick is in maintaining the right amount of edge. An unrestricted arms war costs the world economy trillions of dollars and results in destructive capability that is even more disproportionate to our ability to use it responsibly than there is now. During the cold war, America was sold on the idea that the Russians had nuclear stockpiles that were much bigger and more advanced than the reality turned out to be, and as a result America spent an ungodly fortune making more and more nukes. If both sides had made a few hundred nukes each, that would have been all you needed--instead there are many thousands of devices, which not only wasted money to build but which mean the world is inherently less safe.
Unfortunately, robots are harder. Once they get good enough they can create a decisive advantage in a variety of land, sea, and air combat scenarios. There are not a lot of comparable military advances that have come about in the last few centuries.
As importantly, they decrease the political risk in war-making for superpowers. If you are risking none of your own people when you invade a country, you are much, much, much more likely to invade.
Don't worry you will be able to get a cheap rip off kill bot from alibaba a few weeks after a hacker breaks into the American contractors system and steals the design blue prints.
and everyone will get a [very short] part whether they want it or not.
I've listened to the idea that Nature will again do something to thin out the human race at some point. Our population is getting out of hand. Humans have managed to infest every corner of the planet and they are eating up all the resources they can find. It has been a long time since we have had a really good die-off. Readers here will be aware that the human race has suffered large population decreases in the past due to diseases and what not. This current Ebola thing isn't going to do it. Gruesome it may be but not going to make a big dent.
So maybe this is the one: deep down we are so amazingly stupid, we will engineer our own demise. Build a bunch of autonomous, learning robots whose sole job it is to kill humans. We've read so many sci-fi novels that the outcome is obvious. But some military genius figures we must "win" at all costs. And the price will be quite high.
PKD did it best. This story still creeps me out when I think about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Give it a read. Enjoy the nightmares and hope they stay just nightmares...
-g
...another level of disconnect between us and our violence.
To be fair, when it comes to weapons technology, you can never be too far ahead of the rest. We learned in WWI that simply using the same weapons and armor on naval ships or following the same battlefield tactics and technology (trenches and machine guns) as all the other players resulted in long drawn out bloody battles that typically resulted in a inconclusive outcomes with mass casualties. In WWII the Nazis showed us what years of heavy R&D can achieve when it comes to beating your enemies into submission. Remember -- most of Western Europe fell with barely a whimper and the sole hold-out, England was shelled relentlessly with weapons technology unmatched by even the US till well after the war.
let's play a game
It's computers fighting each other. Don't bother with the mechanics. Let 'em duke it out over interconnects.
I'm convinced that anything they say is "coming" is already here, but not declassified yet. Just look at all the different military aircraft models that were long rumored, with the establishment pinning the sightings on crazies and the fringe.
All this with high ranking officials opining that "we need a game-changing" technology is just the defence complex getting the pubic ready for a radical departure from the military status-quo, so that the reaction will be "Yay!", instead of "*Gasp!*".
Politically, there's not been a better opportunity for a long time. The Gulf Wars and their sequels were OK for unveiling some fairly mundane tech, but the highly dedicated, but low-tech opposition found in those theatres weren't sufficient to create the requisite fear at home. It takes the Russian threat (which has been helped along by the West's strategically botched actions in Ukraine) to get people sufficiently anxious to be ready to receive some truly game-changing military tech with open arms. (Oops, no pun intended there.)
Vaya con huevos, my darling.
- for everybody. That would make actual war meaningless, since it would only be robots destroying each other. Then we could move it on to being a spectator sport, and we can then concentrate on going after terrorists and other criminal gangs. Sounds perfect to me.
And yet the Nazis were decisively defeated by sheer numbers of lower-tech weapons.
A thousand Huns could easily defeat a century of Roman triarii. A thousand Sioux braves could defeat a regiment of dragoons. History abounds with examples of "more" defeating "better". Quality is by no means a guarantor od success over quantity.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
They're working on the Bolo Mark XV Horrendous.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
Or, to paraphrase dear old Stalin, quantity is a quality all of its own.
We have almost no option other than making certain that we can win a conflict regardless of the situation and high tech may be the more perfect form of sparing innocents. But the current that flows in the opposite direction is that we will lose if we can not afford our modes of war. In other words we need to deliver a lot of hell for a tiny cost. Old ways won't work. For example if you take a machine gun that fires 50 caliber rounds at twenty rounds per second and each cartridge costs $12. as delivered to the battle field you quickly discover that you are spending a fortune and that when you run bullets through that weapon you may not hit a single enemy. And it gets worse. Imagine the cost of one napalm bomb dropped by a jet. We simply can not win without total bankruptcy as a consequence. It quickly turns into a situation where we must either use nuclear weapons or bio weapons to crush an enemy. And war cost compound with every new conflict. WW11,Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm and other programs still cost us billions of dollars every year. There is a toggle point at which the US will perish from its war debts.
If you want to conquer, that is true, but if you want to defend yourself, you only need to be able to do enough damage to not be worth attacking.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
"The specter of Kill Bots waging war without human guidance or intervention has already sparked significant political backlash, including a potential United Nations moratorium on autonomous weapons systems. This issue is particularly serious when one considers that in the future, many countries may have the ability to manufacture, relatively cheaply, whole armies of Kill Bots that could autonomously wage war. This is a realistic possibility because today a great deal of cutting-edge research on robotics and autonomous systems is done outside the United States, and much of it is occurring in the private sector, including DIY robotics communities. The prospect of swarming autonomous systems represents a challenge for nearly all current weapon systems, which partly drives the emphasis on DEWs. (Directed-Energy Weapons)"
Also interesting was the comments on how privacy issues affect security of DoD staff, while they don't seem to concerned about how it affects civilian security.
See "Expanding Privacy Issues page" 19.
"Monitoring of individuals and populations using sensors, wearable devices, and IoT will provide detection and predictive analytics that can move toward a health maintenance-based, rather than a disease-based medical model, and also enhance operational readiness. However, there will be many risks involved as these systems are implemented, for example, the many ways that digital data or privacy information can be compromised, issues of ownership or of access to the data. These systems will also require new enterprise-level models for the management and exploitation of potentially huge amounts of health related data."
Above excerpts from "Policy Challenges of Accelerating Technological Change: Security Policy and Strategy Implications of Parallel Scientific Revolutions" by James Kadtke and Linton Wells II at CTNSP