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The US Army Wants Distributed Bot Swarms And An 'Internet of Battlefield Things' (defenseone.com)
turkeydance shares a new report about the U.S. Army Research Lab:
In the coming months, the Lab will fund new programs related to highly (but not fully) autonomous drones and robots that can withstand adversary electronic warfare operations... A second program called the Internet of Battlefield Things seeks to put to military use "the research that's going on in the commercial space" on distributed sensors and Internet-connected devices... One thrust will be equipping drones and other autonomous systems with bigger brains and better networking so that they can function even when an enemy jams their ability to radio back to a human controller for direction... "When you don't have bandwidth, when you're under cyber attack, when you're being jammed. That's the problem we're trying to address."
The lab's director also says they want "as much processing as possible on the node" so it can continue functioning in "contested environments."
The lab's director also says they want "as much processing as possible on the node" so it can continue functioning in "contested environments."
...preferably not from the pony.
The only kind of distributed system we can currently deploy and be relatively certain that it won't be taken over en masse and used against us is humans. And even then, there's no guarantees.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let's hope they read 'Second Variety' by Philippe K. Dick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This will bring a whole new meaning to the "Bluescreen of Death".
This seems like a good time to check your tab and light up a red cigarette. You might want to check which type of blade that malfunctioning one was too.
and someone (a body of people, an organization, what have you) figures out how to seize complete control of them is when the world takes a sharp turn into something nobody really wants. I don't even think this is doomsday-talk either, we're naturally progressing in this direction, have been for some time now. Our paranoia is going to drive us into oblivion if we don't shift our collective mentality soon... ...as if THAT'S going to happen! :)
I tend to rant.
yes and lets give them the ability to self-replicate, and use biomass to do so!
Is just plain DUMB. Remember the phrase "There is ALWAYS Somebody Better"? No matter who is coding your security protocols, someone better WILL come along and hack that shit! Automated weapons and the interwebs, in ANY form such as secure/private webs and otherwise, should be a strict NO NO! Un-jammable, unstoppable, wireless killing machines... Yeah that sounds like NOTHING could possibly go wrong. LOL!
FFS why would you hook up a battlefield swarm to the internet?
So you can make "Call of Duty: Ender's Game Edition"?
If Custer had these at the Little Bighorn ...
Sitting Bull (who was a shaman as well as Lakota War Chief) would likely have hacked them.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
and the robot/drones become (practically) useless or they have enough autonomy to kill on their own? (Which may be violation of some new UN rules on autonomous robots used in war).
Either way, it's not good. Is it likely that an adversary would be able to cut off communications? I'm wondering if there is a failsafe method of communicating with autonomous drones and robots outdoors with a clear line of sight to the sky directly above them. What you need is a satellite with a high powered maser (microwave laser) being able to cut through any jamming and the robot/drone having a high gain directional antennae pointed at the satellite. (If they also had masers on board then presumably could talk back.)
Of course this would only work when the satellite is viewable but if they had enough assets in space (like the GPS satellite constellation) maybe at least one satellite would be in view at a time. Bandwidth, of course, could be quite limited compared to local transmitters but as a backup system it might keep the system from becoming completely helpless (or completely deadly).
This is just speculation of course but perhaps Elon Musk's super constellation of 4000 internet satellites could carry these masers as well. Then they'd almost assuredly have a relatively un-jammable connection (and if his constellation is really going to provide internet for the entire world, they'll have plenty of bandwidth). Maybe if he cuts a deal with the U.S. military, they'll subsidize his constellation in order to put these masers on each satellite.
[I'm assuming that this system would be pretty un-jammable because, with the drone/robot's antennae pointed a a single point(s) in the sky, local jamming would be pretty ineffective. It's a twist on the idea behind the "Northpoint" communications system, but the signal you want to get would be from space not from the ground (the Northpoint system was the other way around). http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04...
Of course the enemy could knock down the satellites or use a nuke-powered EMP blast to fry all the electronics but in that case I think we would be worried about much more than some drones and robots on a battlefield.
As a side project, we'll also need some non-nuclear, small scale EMP weapons.
Everybody will have distributed Bot Swarms.
Think of a Citronella Candle or Bug Zapper, you don't
want other people's Bot Swarms around you in a battle zone, or Urban neighborhood, when law enforcement starts using them.
Botnet edition
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
wars have always been fought to take land from other civilizations because food was scarce. Food isn't really scarce anymore. Our food problems are now just distribution problems. We could end the need for arms greater than a few pistols for the occasional nut job tomorrow if we cared to. Of course, that would require us to give food/shelter to just about everybody without preconditions, and good luck with that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
...imagine a Beowulf cluster of Custers at the Little Bighorn.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
[Autonomous weapons ]
What could possibly go wrong? :-)
"Please put down your weapon!
You have twenty seconds to comply!"
https://youtu.be/A9l9wxGFl4k
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
The number of things that could go wrong with this enterprise are huge. If this starts a military escalation in robotics world wide we could all be in trouble. We already have drones doing all sorts of things like assassinations, especially in Pakistan (surprised they haven't yelled about acts of war given the casualties), or the potential to hack the systems coordinating these proposed drone swarms and turn them against us. I doubt this would be directly connected to the Internet (Internet Of Things (Iot) Is already a joke in IT security these days), but would probably be controlled via satellites, and that could be intercepted or jammed. All someone has to do is capture a few, reverse engineer them, and viola, you make some of your own. This is one of those things where, it looks cool, but just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should. You could argue benefits in say ,construction (lots of researching/testing going on to make use of mini drones to do work in that area because many smaller robots potentially could have more power than one large one, like the insect strength-mass ratio), but as weapons, that could be terrifying. I wonder how long it will be before we start hearing about drone strikes in our own back yard. (See the Val Kilmer film "Real Genius", they just about got it right).
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
The most valuable weapon will be the soldiers that still know how to fight without all of their gadgets.
The question is whose soldiers will that be?
Have gnu, will travel.
Hopefully they will do better than commercial devices: The 'S in IoT stands for 'security.'
the Ruskies could help us with it! I'll send an email to Trump about it.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of Hearts of Iron?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not only that, but why not use nukes if neither side has humans on the battlefield anyway?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A metric ton or two. Delivered in handy 250lbs packages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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