Slashdot Mirror
US Army 'Will Have More Robot Soldiers Than Humans' By 2025, Says Former British Spy (express.co.uk)
John Bassett, a British spy who worked for the agency GCHQ for nearly two decades, has told Daily Express that the U.S. was considering plans to employ thousands of robots by 2025. At a meeting with police and counter-terrorism officials in London, he said: "At some point around 2025 or thereabouts the U.S. army will actually have more combat robots than it will have human soldiers. Many of those combat robots are trucks that can drive themselves, and they will get better at not falling off cliffs. But some of them are rather more exciting than trucks. So we will see in the West combat robots outnumber human soldiers." Daily Express reports: Robotic military equipment is already being used by the U.S Navy and Air Force, in the shape of drones and autonomous ships. In April robotic warfare took a major leap forward after the U.S. Navy launched its very first self-piloting ship designed to hunt enemy submarines. Drones have been a feature of U.S. operations in the Middle East to disrupt terrorist groups. However, those aircrafts are still controlled by humans operating from bases in the U.S. Mr. Bassett also said artificial intelligence and robots technology would combine to create powerful fighting machines. The cyber security expert said: "Artificial intelligence, robotics in general, those will begin to mesh together."
So wars will be won by who has the most money? Oh, wait..
*shakes a leg*
How sad that Asimov's vision (the Three Laws of Robotics) seems to have lost out to James Cameron's post-apocalyptic vision from "Terminator".
They had rubber skin...
The US Army will have more civilian maintenance contractors than soldiers. It seems no one told the robots that they had to do their own maintenance.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
US will have more bad AI-predicting pundits than sane people by 2025.
Table-ized A.I.
yes, the time will come, but not in the next 10 years, 20 at the very earliest, most likely 30 years out.
The Daily Express is essentially sub Daily Mail toilet paper. Only of use for your daily fix of Princess Diana conspiracy theories, cashing in on missing children and denouncing the evils of internet porn.
The fact that the owner has a struggling TV porn business is entirely coincidental.
We can't manage to secure our digital devices against hacking, how much more motivated do you think they're going to get to succeed at it if what's at stake is the annexation of U.S. owned robotic warriors? You won't need a campaign of propaganda and persuasion to flip soldiers into being traitors to their country, all you'll need is a pimply-faced computer nerd with the requisite skill-set and access to the right equipment, and voila, your mechanized soldiers are pwned.
Since they will have all the people that where formerly in the army to shoot at
And I laugh as a deployed active duty USAF member. Hahahah, no.
The only thing that sometimes stops American military aggression is when the US casualties pile up enough for even the most apathetic American to give a shit. Actually it takes the threat of conscription to really make the average American give a shit.
Once this ends we iz fucking doomed.
for the laser-armed satellites that Regan promised in the mid 1980's.
The extremists get a new pool of recruits who had problems with killing people. In the future, when they can be sure to cause only monetary damages they no longer have any moral reservations to fight for any group from an insurrection to extremists.
How does the nature of war change when the only cost (to us) is monetary?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just miles from your doorstep, hundreds of machines are given weapons and trained to kill. The government calls it the Army, but a more alarmist name would be... The Killbot Factory.
Simpsons did it first.
Thus did man become the architect of his own demise.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
by 2045. I find that even scarier than robotization of military. That island is "royally fucked".
skynet or joshua?
Why not just keep the men in the loop?
Well looks like 2026 is the year the rich kills all the poor.
Just keep distracting them with the possibility of 'basic income!' until then.
Just recently I listened to the old radio show X Minus One's adaptation of Philip K Dick's short story, "The Defenders" which is appropriate to this story. In the story a brief nuclear war forces nearly everyone on the planet to live underground while robots continue the fight and the nuclear bombardment on the surface. Unknown to the humans, the robots figured out early on that the war was really stupid, so they stopped fighting and began to repair and renew the world, all the while sending fake war reports back to the humans and telling them that the radiation levels were toxic, when in fact there was no radiation left. Very interesting story.
Here's hoping that if every nation and group in the world starts making robots to fight for us, maybe the robots will realize how stupid this all is and refuse to listen to us until we all come to our senses.
These robot troops can then be sent to any country that we need to go to war w/, w/o worrying about anything beyond financial casualties. Like if we need to occupy Raqqa or Teheran, the robot troops can just be sent in to storm them, and all the suicide bombers won't do a thing to stop them
Should make a coup easy for the right people.
In the machine intelligence saturated future, mediated fags like you will be used for target practice!
Outrage over civilian casualties will be a thing of the past! Now when the drones/robots are told to target a school by mistake there wont be any pesky soldiers to witness and talk about it.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/5/
When you need to qualify your prediction with "and they will get better at not falling off cliffs", it's probably not a strong prediction.
While each device will likely be mostly autonomous it will still be necessary to have some kind of system to issue commands. Something with a good line of sight, where you could set up a network. Even better if this system could be a strong AI to help coordinate troops.
A skynet if you will.
What, you think that just because the US military currently has over 1 million human troops but zero robot ones...
Last I checked they had a few drones, either that or they have some really tiny pilots. I expect the first land-based robots will work in the same way: some autonomy to handle simple tasks but anything complicated will be done by a human "pilot".
We'd have to be able to pay for said robots. Our trillions of dollars of debt tells me it's unlikely.
When all armies are made of robots, it will be senseless for them to fight each other. They will then be used to attack civilians.
More civilians will suffer but probably only indirectly either as collateral damage (in much the same way as drone strikes today kill innocent civilians while targeting terrorists) or because the US will get involved in far more situations than it does today. Unlike humans where every casualty has a negative impact on votes, every destroyed robot means more money for the companies making them which means more money for politicians which means more votes.
$3T blown on Ireq didn't work
Not only did it NOT work, we had our collective asses handed to us.
What we get for voting in a draft dodger that went AWOL for president.
Now we're about to vote in the painted face whore of Babylon.
What has already been observed is that the consolidation of command and control, coupled with the inability of AI to refuse orders, is leading to an increasingly aggressive and belligerent military posture as there is no one to get in the way. When combined with the concept of military dominance, it becomes a pathway to global dominance and a rejection of democratic control.
There needs to be obstacles.
The attacked will use their robots to protect civilians against the attacking robots.
By logical necessity, the battles will mostly be robots against robots. Until one side runs out of robots. Then that side will surrender.
Eventually, there will be one nation. And it will be entirely governed by robots. Its human civilians will not labor; the robots will do it all. Civilians will just luxuriate. Most will get fat and drugged-up until the die. Some will aspire to personal greatness. And then the Sun will go supernova. The end.
Armies of drones will finally transform the world into a true meritocracy. The most brilliant will control them, and by controlling them, the world.
That is exactly how it should be, whether the geniuses have acne problems or not.
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.
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
Government by and for the people makes us all responsible for the government's actions thus the people is legitimate targets.
Yeah, as cool as that might be, good luck with that. Unless by robot soldier they mean an RC vehicle with a gun strapped to it. When they say robot soldier I'm thinking terminator style endo skeletons with glowing red eyes, a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range and the lot.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Just in time for the predicted date of the singularity! I for one welcome etc etc
The last line of defense against tyranny is the fact that our soldiers would almost certainly not violently suppress a generally peaceful coup by the public to take back control of a corrupt government.
Robots will follow their programming.
If we allow autonomous killing machines to be manufactured then the government and the corporations they serve have won, permanently.
just so long as the robots are programmed to question unlawful orders and to follow the Geneva convention, that is the plan, right? um right? oh. no? um. all enemies foreign and domestic? who decides who is an enemy of the state? oh, software. that is great. um, who writes the software? oh, outsourced, umm, yes, of course, lowest bidder, yeah great. what could go wrong?
Why not just fight it out on Counter Strike?
Sounds like eventually war will end up like the Star Trek episode: A Taste Of Armageddon
What an odd thing to note in the article. How many robot trucks have we lost so far falling off cliffs? Why are the driving on cliffs in the first place?
After the wars the USA can switch the robots off quietly rather than dumping them on the street to beg and fend for themselves like they do now....
Robot soldiers used to be called land mines.
Though that was back when they tended to stay put and only attack when you got too close.
Yes the military will absolutely be using less and less humans as will all trades and industries. One real effect is that as a nation we must have the economic and educational abilities to fund and maintain a superior automated war machine. More than ever national defence will be locked hand in hand with our real economic abilities. We must design and produce super robotic systems both in numbers deployed and in quality and function. This means that we had best have the finest scholars in the world or we are dead meat.
First we have to invent "artificial intelligence". The current AI systems are just algorithms mimicking human intelligence.
Human intelligence is pretty bad already, and a machine mimicking that is even worse.
I do expect to see more drones and remotely piloted fighter jets, but combat wetware will be around for a long time.
Who knew Rock 'em Sock 'em robots was a military training tool.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
A war is simply enforcing one actor's political will onto another actor, against that other actor's will. You can't do it unless the civilians which constitute that other actor don't comply. Their leaders might yield, only to be thrown out of office, country can be occupied, but civilians may deny their compliance to occupying army orders ... therefore, end target of any war are exactly and explicitly the civilians, even though it is assumed that they will fold back and yield before they are explicitly threatened.
E.g. strategic bombings of Britain, later of Germany, Japan (including two atomic bombs) in WWII were all aimed against civilians in order to crush defiance and make them pressure their respective leaders to end attacks or to surrender before total military defeat.
Before rise of nations, in feudalism, only religious wars were fought against civilians on purpose, because they had nothing to do with sovereignty. The freedom came with a price - keeper of valuables is the victim of plunderer.
This allows for some things happening before then.
1. Robots will have to become cheaper than poor people
2. People will have to give up joining the military so they can kill someone legally, as a right of adulthood.
3. Tax payers will have to be willing to put their unborn children and grand children into massive debt to afford the robot forces (oh wait, they eagerly do that right now)
4. People will have to get past the human species built in sense of fairness, which will make them uncomfortable when their TV/computer shows America's red white and blue robots brutally slaughtering the citizens of whatever country our corporate interests are eye balling at the time. "Hey that country has a lot of lithium, they need some robodemocracy!"
5. People will have to be willing to eat some rads as nuking robots is OK and fall out drifts.
6. People may have to be willing to just plain get nuked. How do you fight the people who send robotic death to your country?
7. People will have to care what is happening in other countries. I assume cheap sex bots will be available before full robot infantry.
8. There will still have to be enough fuel/oil to get the robots to whatever country has the resources we want.
So I'm not seeing this happening. Too many things stand in the way.
Our heroic AI robot trucks are falling off of cliffs. They need our support. Please send money to www.notarealcause.net, and Support The Troops!
How will the robotic overthrow of mankind succeed unless we support their evil, anti-human quest!?
AI is too exploitable... I met this guy, named John Connor, who taught me how to beat them.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling