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US Air Force says decision-making attack drones will be here by 2047
- Thread starter edesignuk
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Ah yes. I can see the scenario now. A robot tank running low on fuel, scans the area for potential fuel sources. It finds no dead bodies, only some civilians wandering about. It's program dictates that live bodies are not viable fuel, but dead bodies are. Being a military robot, its mission is its first priority. Bang bang. Viable fuel source.
there is no possible positive end to this.. skynet is coming!!
and so it begins..
As Rhodey said in Iron Man (my favorite movie) "The future of air combat. Is it manned or unmanned? I'll tell you in my experience, no unmanned aerial vehicle will ever trump a pilot's instinct. "
well.. i don't want anything coming back with a load on and "something" having gone wrong at the original target.
What if the "something" was not so much that the target went bad, but some of the sensors on the thing went bad. Then on the way home, who knows what else degrades.
Down this path, trying to make it safer, lie ever more "failsafe" mechanisms that jack up the cost of a weapon until one of them costs enough to feed the poor for a year. If they have to build the thing, then let it be built to make a one way trip and hope it doesn't kill any more innocent civilians than get killed by less "smart" predators now.
I dunno, I was just throwing out hypotheticals off the top of my head.
Anyway, I read the document that was referenced - Google docs has a copy, too - and people are getting their Terminator buttons pushed without really reading much about what capabilities and the degree of autonomy that these things will have.
These things are still human controlled systems. The ground attack UAV that's orbiting the area is still having it's targets designated by a human. The autonomous wingman type UAV is still keying off of a manned vehicle. It just does the intermediary steps on its own. You know, kind of like how a USB drive will mount itself.
If people are really frightened of unmanned weapons autonomously killing humans in any real sense, they'd be more concerned about landmines, which are a reality in the here and now vs yet another future warfare concept from the propeller beanie crowd at the USAF that may or may not happen.
I think the general public has an even stranger view of artificial intelligence than the military.
By 2047, this whole idea will be past its prime, much like the F-22 is now in the post-Cold War era.
Engadget.
Are they completely insane?
I know it's a way off, but at no point in time should a machine be making life and death decisions on its own. Absurd.
We already have "decision making attack drones". They are called "politicians".
Oh yea that cold war is just so over, will never return, right?
"Russian Subs Patrolling Off East Coast of U.S."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/05/world/05patrol.html?_r=1
Engadget.
Are they completely insane?
I know it's a way off, but at no point in time should a machine be making life and death decisions on its own. Absurd.
"It's all still extremely vague,"
Uh, yeah, that's the whole 2047 aspect of things right there, only 38 years away, much ado about nothing, move along, move along.
How´s the F-22 going to stop a submarine?
And yes, the Cold War Era is over. New military "tensions" will not reinstate it and revert the world to a nuclear arms race and hyped fear mongering about how the commies are coming.
Stupid machines have already been blowing up civilians, firing rockets into trains and gunning down ally fighters. No wait, that was humans.
I would be more concerned if they could actually keep the technology from being stolen....ala F22 specs already being in foreign hands,and they still do not know,how exactly the theft occurred.