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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.
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US will have more bad AI-predicting pundits than sane people by 2025.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
Make love-bots not war-bots.
And I laugh as a deployed active duty USAF member. Hahahah, no.
How does the nature of war change when the only cost (to us) is monetary?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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 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!
$3T blown on Ireq didn't work
Not only did it NOT work, we had our collective asses handed to us.
I'm assuming he means Iraq, and say what you want about the aftermath, but militarily speaking, they got stomped into the ground and then we jumped on the bits til we got blisters.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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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
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....
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.
$3T blown on Ireq didn't work
I'm assuming he means Iraq, and say what you want about the aftermath, but militarily speaking, they got stomped into the ground and then we jumped on the bits til we got blisters.
No, he clearly said Ireq. We did so badly in the "Ireq" war our government doesn't even want us to know that the country exists. It's like when Britain lost Sodor's war of independence and was forced to start calling the Fat Controller "Sir Topham Hat", we were supposed to forget we once disdainfully referred to that dictator as "fat".
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Who knew Rock 'em Sock 'em robots was a military training tool.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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