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Artificial Intelligence technology has come a long way in the last decade or so. Truth be told, and in spite of our apprehensions, combat robots would be safer to civilians on the battlefield, more precise, and less costly than sending thousands of troops to hostile areas. The future of warfare is in AI, but how far is too far for automated combat?
Warfare
Future
Combat
Technology
Posted 11 y ago
Responses: 23
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I can't say that that AI will in the near future replace humans in combat. Any video game programmer will tell you how difficult it is to program realistic AI. Also there are systems that fail and there would still need to be human involvement in the decision making process to be certain that the right target is being engaged. I think it would augment human capabilities but it won't replace it. There were times when people have considered technology replacing human intelligence but there are some things that a sat image, a drone, signals intelligence can't tell you that a person on the ground can.
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Cpl Benjamin Long
As for the systems that pin point fire.. they are good at what they do, but human ingenuity can overcome such devices. such as decoy shooting. Setting up a remote rifle via radio control to do a hitsuke distraction to concentrate your fire to the straw dummy, where they ambush you from the flank or rear...
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MAJ Bryan Zeski
Of course it is possible to exploit any system. Our Army is based on systems - all of which are exploitable. There is no significant drawback in the enemy eventually being able to identify the type of AI in use and destroy it - in much the same way the enemy is able to identify our convoy patterns, actions on contact, and response times - and exploit that as well. When that happens, we go back and reassess our actions and change our tactics - at the cost of lives. If AI tactics and plans are compromised or identified, the loss is the AI platform - not lives. AI can then be changed, by people and programming, to do something different.
For me, the bottom line is that AI combat systems will decrease both friendly and civilian casualties and reduce collateral damage.
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Cpl Benjamin Long
Sir, I don't believe a compentent enemy would destroy such hardware... If these systems are as reliable as they are made out to be, they will reprogram or or reverse engineer them to be deployed against us. The SEA already stole the designs for one of the next generation fighter jets and the Chinese cloned the technology... It is not as simple as sending out the bulls. In a game of chess, if I give up a queen with no fight... Do you take it? War is about more than just the implements, the toys and the fancy automatons that we use...
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SGT Richard H.
MAJ Bryan Zeski my biggest reservation to the use of AI on the battlefield is one that you mentioned four times in your first response to Cpl Ray Fernandez (though I gather that you mean it quite a different context than I do)
"AI doesn't care".
But.....Soldiers do.
"AI doesn't care".
But.....Soldiers do.
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How much easier is it for a drone pilot to fire hell fire missiles or drop bombs on people than it is for a pilot? I don't know... but we've been working hard to cut the real-life, personal experience of war as much as possible. This pulls a lot of our brothers and sisters out of harm's way in achieving our objectives, but creates a buffer between human beings and the horrors of war. It becomes like a video game, and I've never had a problem killing a character on CoD or some other war game, but would likely have very serious difficulty killing someone in real life. Robots just continue this trajectory.
Robots and AI machines as warriors create an entire new risk for us. Any computer can be hacked. Some are much more difficult to hack than others, but what if a robot warrior was captured. They would undoubtedly be connected to the net somehow, and could possibly be used to insert a virus into vital defense systems. They could be reverse engineered, or otherwise programmed to be used against us. And the ultimate concern of AI is the achievement of self-awareness where they see humanity in general as a threat.
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Cpl Ray Fernandez
TSgt, you bring up some great points. The problem I see above all by automating a military force and removing the human from the equation is that we lose the biggest bit of security against tyranny and abuse of power, the ability for a human to question if what they are being told to do is legal or immoral. Suppose we went to an AI based force as LTC Paul Labrador ala SkyNet. If someone ordered it to fire on civilians would it have in its core programming to refuse the order? Would it improvise in a manner of having self preservation in mind to adapt to tactics of an enemy that may not be armed with conventional weapons. The ability to adapt and improvise as opposed to sticking to pure doctrine and tactics is what has made us one of the most formidable fighting forces in history.
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Combat robots will be safer to civilians on the battlefield, more precise, and less costly than sending the equivalent amount of troops to hostile areas. The only factor in attaining each of these is time. Current day robots and unmanned systems are a factor more capable than they were 2 decades ago, and if you applied Moore's Law, their advancement will only continue exponentially over time till they get to a point when they are able to make decisions faster and better than their human counterpart. They will be able to analyze situations faster and more accurately than a human. They will be able to tell what humans or targets to engage and what or who are non-combatants. I surmise we will have a lower "Cost of War" or collateral damage component to future engagements where AI or robotics are employed more than actual human boots on the ground. You do lose a large "human element" to fighting war in this manner. Our Insurgent enemies in Iraq and Taliban enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan have already criticized our use of robotics in warfare as it removes us from the fight as if they are not worthy to engage in a humanly manner on the battlefield. It is a very alien concept in their culture and beliefs, but hey, most of them still squat just anywhere in the open and wipe their butt with their left hand. Anyways, only the wealthier nations at first would be able to afford to engage in this type of warfare as you see America is the leader in development followed very rapidly now by some of the other more powerful nations around the world. And it will be robots vs. robots in some situations, but there will always be the robots vs. humans as you can't only have robots in the conflict. You will need humans somewhere on the ground to support operations and conduct certain tasks. But it most certainly will not only be robot vs robot and human vs human fighting as that notion is no longer a valid way to fight when you introduce advance robotics to the battlefield.
The hardware will also get better to where they can operate longer periods of time than a human can and with less and less component failure. I am a UAV pilot, or "Drone" pilot and have been doing this for 10 years now, and I can say we have made leaps and bounds with reliability and automation over what UAVs were able to do 10 years ago. I have witnessed system reliability go from 1 crash every 1,000 flights hours to 1 in 50,000 flight hours on some systems. And even then, the usual reason for a crash is due to pilot error. One day, they will surpass even manned aviation safety records and will be statistically safer to have the autopilot fly the aircraft than have a human in the cockpit that is more likely to cause an accident. This same concept will naturally follow suit for automated cars where they can prevent more accidents and drive safer than a human can. The google car is still new and will take several hundreds of thousands of hours of operating to improve upon as it did with the military and flying it's "drones" for hundreds of thousands of hours. I can only imagine that drones in 20 years will be a factor of up to 10X more capable and lethal than they currently are, so the driverless cars will be no different.
In the mean time though, it has proven very effective to pair humans with the automated systems to watch over them and provide command inputs when the systems reach a current programming limit on their ability to make their own decisions or adapt to their environment. Yes, it is still a human pushing the button when it comes to engaging targets, but that will also one day slowly be given to the computers to make the decision to pull the trigger when they engage a target once it meets their programmed engagement criteria. Will there be accidents along the way? Perhaps. But we have very smart people working on the programming and thinking from every angle to prevent accidents as are the people that employ the systems so that they are safety tested and or operated out in the field. Will Skynet one day take over everything because we programmed everything to be smarter than was for our own good? Maybe. But I think enough robotics creators, system operators, and policy makers have seen the Terminator or Matrix or AI Robot movies to prevent such a thing from every happening and things getting out of our control.
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SPC Chris Stiles
I think it has already been well stated that Moore's law cannot progress for infinity, I don't think anybody is arguing against that. But so I can get some clarity, your two previous comments seem to contradict one another. In one you say when "moore's exception kicks in, all the tech is useless". Then the next comment you say "Moore's exception has nothing to about being useless", so which is it?
I agree that when we hit the limit of progression, there will be a hinderance, as in we will no longer be able to advance our tech, or we'll have to start stacking ICs like we do with processors now, at least until we can break that barrier with new tech. I don't see how it will spell disaster as you have stated at least twice now. All I can forsee is that our tech advancement will be stymied for a period. What do you predict for this disaster you speak of?
I agree that when we hit the limit of progression, there will be a hinderance, as in we will no longer be able to advance our tech, or we'll have to start stacking ICs like we do with processors now, at least until we can break that barrier with new tech. I don't see how it will spell disaster as you have stated at least twice now. All I can forsee is that our tech advancement will be stymied for a period. What do you predict for this disaster you speak of?
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Cpl Benjamin Long
spelling disaster? I can say that it would collapse, but the manner in which it does so is unknown as the variables are infinite to calculate. All I can say is once you reach the limit, the platform must be changed to one that has a higher limit. It is like the wheel vs the jet engines. You can only do so many things with a wheel until you have done everything with it. So therefore, once the wheel is tapped out so to say; then we must go to a different platform that has better versatility. With our current design of the computer... It can never achieve an intelligence; so we have to design something other than a computer to reach an AI. I believe this would have to involve integrating biological systems and electromechanical systems as the only intelligence systems known in the universe exist in biological systems.
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Cpl Benjamin Long
As for the contradiction; that is intentional. The tech at the platform for which the scope applies would be at the limit for that scope. If you apply the lim to a different platform then it would be at a different constant so therefore when certain tech becomes antiquated, changing the platform would redefine the Limit function for the new platform being used.
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Cpl Ray Fernandez
Even Moore's Law has its limitations, Intel and a lot of other chipmakers are looking for a new material to develop chips with, due to nearing the max of transistors they can fit on chips. Until there is a new material developed we may see the doubling decrease to about every 3 years and with in a year to five years reach our limits with current tech. Is it any wonder why CPUs have been increasing cores instead of their clockspeeds?
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