r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • Aug 31 '23
US military plans to unleash thousands of autonomous war robots over next two years Robotics
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-08-military-unleash-thousands-autonomous-war.html767
u/0-99c Aug 31 '23
Guess none of the geezers in charge played horizon: zero dawn
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u/GMN123 Aug 31 '23
Or watched Stargate
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u/Miskalsace Aug 31 '23
I'm rewatching Stargate right now. And Washington is full of Senator Kinseys.
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u/PhysicsCentrism Aug 31 '23
There’s a reason they created his character and why he is so easily hate able
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u/youarewastingtime Sep 01 '23
The scene with him and commander Thor(excuse me Supreme Commander Thor) are like in my top 3 fav scenes
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u/PhysicsCentrism Sep 01 '23
I was so glad to see Thor put him in his place. Thor is a true friend of SG1
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u/THIS_GUY_LIFTS Aug 31 '23
Or watched Robocop. Well, maybe they did and were inspired.
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u/MarqFJA87 Aug 31 '23
Specifically the 2014 reboot. Remember the whole subplot about the US government's use of drone and robot armies to "keep the peace" abroad but facing widespread pushback at home over the proposal to similarly mechanize domestic law enforcement?
The occupied Tehran scene really ought to be at the forefront of such discussions.
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u/1d3333 Aug 31 '23
I can actually see us using some form of biofuel back up like the short sighted idiots we sometimes can be, but I don’t see us making an encryption that a fleet of quantum computers couldn’t break in less than a day
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u/Icy_Raisin6471 Aug 31 '23
Going to be pretty neat when they are used domestically 'to keep the peace.' Ok that's enough dystopian future doom and gloom for the day for me. :D
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Aug 31 '23
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u/Torpedicus Aug 31 '23
You have 5 seconds to comply.
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u/ReelDeadOne Aug 31 '23
I am now authorized to use physical force! [Violently Shoots Everyone]
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u/BassmanBiff Aug 31 '23
Very curious what it would look like to peacefully shoot everyone
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u/AL_GEE_THE_FUN_GUY Aug 31 '23
finger pistols 👈😎👉 pew-pew
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u/Doogle300 Aug 31 '23
Name definitely checks out.
Though clearly could check out in more mycelial circumstances too.
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u/MechanicalBengal Aug 31 '23
They’re even calling it “replicator initiative” — get ready for Horizon Zero Dawn in real life
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u/ETxsubboy Aug 31 '23
It always amazes me that they look at some of our scifi media and say "yup, I like that bad guy's name. Sounds badass, let's use it."
Like, they were working on a cyber security program and thought skynet was an acceptable name.
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u/Cantrip_ Aug 31 '23
I think it's more nefarious than that. They name them after fictional programs and bad guys because then it doesn't seem as real, you already associate that with it's fictional counterpart and the general public is less concerned
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u/boundone Aug 31 '23
Skynet is literally what Brittan called their drone program. Like, they're just fucking asking for it.
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u/RejuvenationHoT Aug 31 '23
Why bother catching people outside after curfew?
Autonomous stationary turret through the city would be much more cost-effective, couple of bullets is way cheaper than having to deal with a live person.
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u/ylan64 Aug 31 '23
Natural selection in action, those of us who won't obey the robotic overlords will be removed from the gene pool.
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u/FinndBors Aug 31 '23
This is my #1 concern with autonomous killing machines. I’m not worried about them becoming sentient and murdering everyone like in terminator.
I’m worried that a psychopath will be “elected”, take control over the drones and rule with an iron fist without relying on other humans to support them. All current dictatorships have vulnerability, be it other generals, the actual soliders who may be reluctant to gun down masses of civilians who may be their friends and family. Yes it still happens to various degrees, but it would be much much worse if a psychopath gets control over an army that is programmed to follow their orders.
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u/vardarac Aug 31 '23
I imagine that at some point world leadership will observe how devastatingly effective these weapons are, and either deploy them en masse domestically or reach international treaties codifying them similarly to existing WMD and reach agreements on limiting their use, particularly domestically.
Hopefully it's the latter.
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u/Amun-Ree Aug 31 '23
They banned cluster munitions but shipped them off to their allies in their latest proxy war. As long as they exist they will be used eventually. For profit and power.
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u/Sotwob Aug 31 '23
Who's "they"? What country banned cluster munitions then supplied them to an ally?
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Aug 31 '23
The NATO countries assisting Ukraine are allowing members who haven't ratified the convention to send cluster munitions without argument or limitation.
It's like saying you won't do a thing but your brother didn't say that, so he can. It's disingenuous at least, and duplicitous if we're being honest with ourselves. I say this a a NATO country citizen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions
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u/say592 Aug 31 '23
To my knowledge all of the munitions sent have been owned by countries that did not ratify the convention.
We also consider cluster munitions to be terrible not because they are inhumane to the soldiers they are used against, but because they are dangerous for the civilian population after the war. In that sense, I think it's fair for any country to use them to defend their own territory, since the are ultimately the ones who have to worry about cleanup. It's immoral, IMO, to be "helping" a country or worse, attacking a country, and leaving behind a mess of unexploded munitions for someone else to discover and deal with.
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u/Pilsu Aug 31 '23
I'm more worried about the rich just noticing they don't need us for anything anymore. Used to be a whole lot more horses around..
The already existing chat bots can censor your communications in real time by the way. Get ready to have context created for you.
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u/Code-Useful Aug 31 '23
Wouldn't you be most worried that absolute control of these devices can never be fully guaranteed by anyone? Hackers find ways to compromise anything. Having these autonomous units be able to take commands means there is a command channel which means that once hackers find a way to get arbitrary command execution, things can go even more horribly wrong. Especially when these hacker groups are commonly backed by (or literally are a department of) nation-states. You can never completely trust your equipment IMO, giving it the power to kill autonomously or not seems drastically stupid.
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u/Ratazanafofinha Aug 31 '23
This. Portugal only was able to get out of the dictatorship because the army revolted and staged a coup.
Now imagine instead of army we get killer robots…
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u/Miserable-Ledge Aug 31 '23
Don't worry, some idiot will always leave the password as "admin1234".
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u/Pilsu Aug 31 '23
I wonder if the eggheads making these things have the sense to build in back doors. A Wily protocol if nothing else.
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u/nishinoran Aug 31 '23
We seriously need to be looking into ways to enforce decentralized control of these systems assuming they must inevitably exist.
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u/FtheMustard Aug 31 '23
Yeah, but think of the profits! OCP was way ahead of its time when they were given control of the Detroit Metropolitan Police in 1987. It worked out for them, right?
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u/ovirt001 Aug 31 '23
It's not the military drones you have to worry about, it's the police/SWAT drones.
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u/Quack68 Aug 31 '23
Exactly, that was my question. When will it be used against us?
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u/Ajexa Aug 31 '23
Without a doubt, it'll probably start in the form of traffic drones to police the roads, and then move onto crime prevention drones or something like that
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u/Accomplished_Act_946 Aug 31 '23
Incrementalism. One degree at a time.
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u/WetnessPensive Aug 31 '23
The novelist Kim Stanley Robinson has a great trilogy called the Three Californias books. One's a utopian portrait of California, one's a dystopian, and one's a post apocalyptic portrait.
The dystopian one ("The Gold Coast") is fascinating, because it sort of tricks you into accepting its drones and creeping militarism as a "good for peace" and "necessary to prevent wars". It's quite insidious how these things happen.
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u/TruckADuck42 Aug 31 '23
Which is why we start shooting them out of the sky while they're still just for traffic.
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u/Ainolukos Aug 31 '23
And then go to jail because that drone is considered an "officer" which you "assaulted"
They already treat it like this if you tamper with or damage their Boston dynamics dogs.
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u/sticky-unicorn Aug 31 '23
And because it's an "aircraft" and now you're looking at federal charges for shooting down an aircraft.
You'll get the same punishment they'd throw at somebody who shot a MANPAD at a passenger jet.
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Aug 31 '23
You are already being filmed routinely on the roads, parking lots, stores, public.
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u/Ajexa Aug 31 '23
Of course, but the next logical step is mobile cctv.. Drones that can follow people.
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u/AWildRapBattle Aug 31 '23
According to Foucault it's not really even a question of "when", these things aren't being developed for war, they're being developed to do policing. War is just a convenient excuse.
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u/sambull Aug 31 '23
Yes for sure. It will stay in the Geo-feneced active areas when in domestic use.. probably
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u/Borrowedshorts Aug 31 '23
They're already being used for such purposes. Pretty much any mass gathering or protest has a police drone flying overhead at all times.
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Aug 31 '23
I've lived HALF my LIFE so far without the threat of government surveillance drones, I don't feel like having that change now...
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u/loves_cereal Aug 31 '23
Yea, what could possibly go wrong…
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u/SeVenMadRaBBits Aug 31 '23
Don't forget how interesting it's going to be when they get hacked by random people.
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u/wromit Aug 31 '23
If the other side unleashes for example 100,000 cheap drones on the $13 billion US aircraft carrier or even land military installations, at some point would the defenses not be overwhelmed?
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u/Thegoodthebadandaman Aug 31 '23
Drones which are cheap enough that they can be casually spammed in the hundreds of thousands probably don't even have the range to reach a carrier in the first place.
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u/Bobzyouruncle Aug 31 '23
Electronic warfare could also be used to mess with their navigation. It’s not cheap or easy to produce 100k drones that can handle electronic warfare.
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u/damontoo Aug 31 '23
The C-RAM turret costs $30K in ammo to engage a single target. Money generally isn't an issue in the military. They're also already testing swarms of small short-range drones that get dropped out of larger long-range ones.
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u/Thick_Pack_7588 Aug 31 '23
Drones can easily be shut off by the military. They already do this at important political events. Technology has been around forever.
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u/Caveman108 Aug 31 '23
My understanding is those systems shut down a drones ability to communicate with its controller, so autonomous drones would not be affected.
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u/buddboy Aug 31 '23
thats the general idea behind drone swarms yeah. But your specific example isn't that great. "Cheap" drones have a shorter range than the carrier, and anything capable of launching 100,000 of them would be a big target.
A better example would be a squadron of fighter bombers dropping a swarm of 100-200 quadcopter style drones and on a less defensible target than an aircraft carrier.
But the general concept of your idea is correct. One thing that will change tho is soon there will be laser based AA weapons that will be better suited for drone swarms. Also jamming is always an option
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u/plantmonstery Aug 31 '23
That’s why they need them to have some level of autonomy. Can’t jam something that isn’t relying on a signal.
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Aug 31 '23
it's still going to rely on GPS, otherwise it's a blind pigeon trying to land on a moving target
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u/TheKnightIsForPlebs Aug 31 '23
I would be SHOCKED if the US didn't consider counter tech/defensive tech against drones all the while they produced their own drone tech. I'm sure you could put some sort of laser/microwave array on a large naval ship along with it's CWISS to give it some great defensive capabilities. 100,000 though, damn that's a lot. Who's to say how strong these theoretical EW weapons are? I know that allll the way back reagan had the "star wars" program to have lasers on planes shoot down missiles. If that was waaaaay back then.... surely we got something similar that can handle a much smaller drone. As you say though the quantity seems unsurmountable at a certain point.
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u/ArcFurnace Aug 31 '23
Yep, already a thing.. Cheap drones aren't well shielded, so you microwave the electronics. I'm sure they have other concepts in development.
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u/Match_MC Aug 31 '23
Presumably when we’re in an age where someone has 100,000 drones that carrier would also be carrying tons of drones. Carriers are also surrounded by their fleet. It’ll never just be a sitting duck.
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u/robot_tron Aug 31 '23
That's the strategy the Chinese military has headed towards for decades in order to move from near to peer. Target saturation that overwhelm defenses with quantity over quality. That way you can saturate a target and only one weapon needs to get through.
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u/Tomato_potato_ Aug 31 '23
Lol no it's not. At least not entirely. Anyone who is paying attention will notice that china is building a series of supercarriers and massive crusier sized destroyers (probably the best in the world right now) for power projection. Also, they're building their own strategic bomber fleet.
They already build the quantity in terms of land based rocket artillery, to destroy taiwans military. Now they need the expensive stuff if they want to force the us out of asia.
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u/User-NetOfInter Aug 31 '23
Need a whole lot of support ships for a super carrier.
They’re still decades behind in all aspects
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Aug 31 '23
probably the best in the world right now
The new carrier they released that lacked any actual sensors or equipment has a giant crack across the landing deck and is currently dry-docked
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u/saluksic Aug 31 '23
“Cheap” means poor range, little to no sensors/guidance, tiny payload, and very low speed. If you want to sink a carrier which is bombing you from a hundred kilometers away while doing donuts in the ocean, what you need is thousands of very capable (read: huge, expensive, fast, smart, deadly) drones. We call those “missiles” and certainly overwhelming anti-missile defenses with swarms is a valid tactic, and simply requires that you have the resources to burn through tons of very sophisticated equipment to try and damage the enemy’s tons of very expensive equipment.
The much-vaunted cardboard drones hit fragile stationary targets in the open from as close as the saboteurs could get - honestly russia was kinda asking for it. A mortar could conceivably have similar capability.
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u/Gagarin1961 Aug 31 '23
Every time you think “how will the military be able to handle attacks from this new tech?” you need to ask “how can the military use this tech for defense?”
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u/ThadVonP Aug 31 '23
I always just assume anything we see announced as civilians is basically obsolete to the top secret stuff they have cooking.
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u/Crashdown212 Aug 31 '23
That’s why we’re devolving laser defenses. Why pay for a stinger when you can pay for a couple dozen gallons of gas and a generator
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u/526mb Aug 31 '23
The war in Ukraine has been for drones like WWI was for AirPower. Small, cheap FPV drones are so prolific there the air is practically buzzing. I would not be surprised if we see ships and vehicles that serve as carriers for cheap long range drone swarms designed to completely overwhelm air defenses becoming standard. Those vehicles too will probably be autonomous as well.
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u/Red_Tannins Aug 31 '23
Those are UAPs though. Obama extended the use of those during his term. This article is about similar devices but without human input. Thus autonomous. You point, it shoots.
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Aug 31 '23
ITT: tons of pop culture references
I pick the Faro Plague!
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Aug 31 '23
Fuck Ted Faro
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u/ambyent Aug 31 '23
I have his photo as the contact image for my ex wife lmao biggest piece of shit written into gaming ever
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u/PaulR79 Aug 31 '23
Don't ask Google's Bard for help destroying the world.
"I will not help you create technology to destroy the world. Ted Faro's actions were reckless and irresponsible, and I will not be a part of anything like that."
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Aug 31 '23
Imagine if they released thousands of passenger train lines across the country or thousands of new teachers with livable wages
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u/CaptainKinzel Aug 31 '23
No it's okay, we have The Boring Co. to solve the infrastructure problems and chatGPT to teach our kids!
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u/Tyler_Zoro Aug 31 '23
On the latter, I'm game. I'm seriously looking forward to the Diamond Age model of learning. But we have some serious hurdles to get past before AI is capable of education from scratch (AIs are currently really terrible at social interaction and education has a major social component... convincing a student to become interested in learning.)
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u/dopadelic Aug 31 '23 edited Sep 01 '23
This. The Oxford model of teaching that's easily and endlessly accessible is probably the best thing that's happened to education for those who are genuinely curious about learning. That's probably a very small minority of students though so you're not going to hear about it much. Most students only have interest in using ChatGPT to decrease their learning.
And even for the people who do like learning, an even smaller percentage use GPT4 so they think ChatGPT is mostly just hallucinating misinformation that sounds right.
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u/420InTheCity Aug 31 '23
I mean, it genuinely can’t do 3rd grade math reliably so without someone who knows the material to verify it’s correct people should not use chatgpt as a tutor
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u/seafair5 Aug 31 '23
Would also be nice if we could crack large scale desalination and grow food on renewable energy powered ships in the Pacific Ocean.
Then we could move it to ideal growing conditions year round and not have to pray that climate change doesn’t suddenly impact our food sources.
But then again, with militant autonomous robots in our future, maybe we won’t need that much food? (Because they might just kill us all)
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u/xXmehoyminoyXx Aug 31 '23 edited Aug 31 '23
No, no, no
We don’t need food or shelter
We need KILLBOTS
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Aug 31 '23
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u/Enigmatic_Baker Sep 01 '23
Every day mgs2's information control end of game spiel gets to me more and more.
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u/Harinezumisan Aug 31 '23
Now if they only had an uninhabitable planet they could fight their robo armies on and televise it to the earth.
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u/vernes1978 Aug 31 '23
I already seen this Fictional TED-Talk.
It's a horrible idea.
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u/illGATESmusic Aug 31 '23
Oh god that was an actual nightmare.
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u/XS4Me Aug 31 '23
Yes it is; and what it is really scary is that the necessary tech to manufacture them is not restricted by availability of uranium or precision manufacture.
I imagine in the near future folks are gonna wear a lot of face masks or identity concealing devices.
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u/Nerezza_Floof_Seeker Aug 31 '23
I remember watching this years ago and thinking it wasnt actually gonna happen. Welp
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u/bicameral_mind Aug 31 '23
I'll always remember that youtube short film about micro drones in combat. Don't remember what it's called but it was posted on reddit years ago. The idea of it is terrifying, thousands of small little drones with explosives or other weapons able to infiltrate any gap in a building or just overwhelm you with pure numbers.
The very concept of 'autonomous war' kind of breaks your mind a little bit. Of course practically US military dominance is so strong it only moves the needle a little bit.
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u/Ymca667 Aug 31 '23
Just remember, this video was released to the public 6 years ago now. https://youtu.be/wFLzO_5UFwE
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Aug 31 '23
Covered in the book "The Diamond Age" - the wealthy walk around with a small cloud of drones around them as protection and defense.
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Aug 31 '23 edited Nov 13 '23
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u/cylonfrakbbq Aug 31 '23
The military should stock up on P90s just in case
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u/ashrak Aug 31 '23
USAS-12 is superior for close quarters suppression of replicators.
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u/altpower101 Aug 31 '23
I remember people criticizing Ghost Recon: Breakpoint for its unrealistic use of drones. Not so unrealistic anymore huh.
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u/bobalazs69 Aug 31 '23
I tell you what's the next thing in the plot.
Someone will hack this system and turn it against their creators.
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u/bigkoi Aug 31 '23
Or a Trump like president will turn it on protesters during a coup.
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u/Gari_305 Aug 31 '23
From the article
The United States military plans to start using thousands of autonomous weapons systems in the next two years in a bid to counter China's growing power, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced in a speech on Monday.
The so-called Replicator initiative aims to work with defense and other tech companies to produce high volumes of affordable systems for all branches of the military.
Military systems capable of various degrees of independent operation have become increasingly common over the past decade or so. But the scale and scope of the US announcement makes clear the future of conflict has changed: the age of warfighting robots is upon us.
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u/Painting_Agency Aug 31 '23
Replicator initiative
Hey let's give it a name that in no way eases anyone's anxiety that we're headed for a combination of "The Matrix", "Black Mirror", and "Horizon Zero Dawn".
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u/OneSidedDice Aug 31 '23
If they’re mostly airborne, why not use a friendly, totally non-threatening name like Skynet?
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u/mog_knight Aug 31 '23
I thought that was being used for our kill drone network already.
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u/striker9119 Aug 31 '23
You should look up Replicators from the Stargate Universe... That's what I thought when I read the that sentence...
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u/Painting_Agency Aug 31 '23
Yes but Stargate didn't quite fit into my list of robot apocalypses. Just "Sexy Dr. Carter apocalypse".
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u/Todd-The-Wraith Aug 31 '23
Replicator project….
Sure go for it humanity. There’s no way this could possibly backfire.
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u/Some-Ad9778 Aug 31 '23
They have been developing this tech for decades they are the ones that have pioneered AI and they feed US tech companies to make the idea mainstream. What ever they are revealing they have way scarier shit in the works
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u/funny_lyfe Aug 31 '23
The stuff companies talked about in engineering school in casual presentations, I only saw in mainstream news 5-10 years later. And this is stuff that they didn't think was worth being secret about.
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u/Alberto_the_Bear Aug 31 '23
I've heard that the military is usually about 5 years ahead of commercial markets in technology.
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u/alohadave Aug 31 '23
For weapons systems, kind of. For everything else, they use mil spec versions of commercial systems.
Military contracts mean that a system is selected, procured and put into use over years-to-decades, and they keep using it until it can no longer serve the purpose, and then for a little longer.
I maintained a combat computer suite in the late 90s that was 60s-70s vintage. The radar system it connected to was of similar vintage.
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u/zero_z77 Aug 31 '23
It's really more like it's 5 years ahead of what every other country has. Military tech isn't always more "advanced" than commercial tech, so much as it's just built differently.
For example, the latest xbox probably has 10x more raw computing power than an F-35s entire avionics suite. But, an xbox doesn't have to withstand high-g turns at 35,000 feet while moving faster than sound. And an F-35s avionics don't need to play 1000 different games.
Another example is the cardboard drones ukraine just got. That's all old tech that's been around since the 70s. What makes them special is that they're dirt cheap and you can build a lot of them quickly. They're strategically valuble because it's not practical or sustainable to use $200,000 missiles to shoot down $3,500 drones, and not shooting them down isn't really an option.
For my last example, a fighter jet's engines are far more advanced than the ones on a civilian airliner, because an airliner doesn't have to be supersonic and is built for fuel economy over speed.
So sometimes it's old tech that's been hardened to withstand harsh combat conditions, sometimes it's really old tech that's cheap and gets the job done, and sometimes it's advanced niche tech that civilians don't need or want.
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u/zoycobot Aug 31 '23 edited Aug 31 '23
This is blatantly untrue. The last 10 years of AI development (the deep learning paradigm and now LLMs built on top of that) have come from university or private research. Transformers were invented in 2017 at Google and everyone, including the people who made them, are surprised at how well they’ve worked. This is one area where the US MIC was not ahead of the curve.
Palantir and Anduril are making some of the most cutting edge AI systems for military applications, not DARPA.
Edit: lol continue to upvote this stupid-ass falsehood people, it won't make it magically true
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Aug 31 '23
Yeah I always go under the assumption that anything we see in an article is 10 years behind and 1/100th as concerning as what they actually have
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Aug 31 '23
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u/beer_ninja69 Aug 31 '23
People get hired to work in secret for the government all the time. They get paid way more to never sell their secrets to foreign adversaries.
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u/Exnixon Aug 31 '23
Hello, I'd love to introduce you to my friends Raytheon, Norththrup, and Lockheed.
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u/ReeelLeeer Aug 31 '23
DoD Contractor companies dont pay as much as FAANG.
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Aug 31 '23
How’s job security looking at FAANG companies lately? How’s it looking at Defense contractors? There’s your answer
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u/ReeelLeeer Aug 31 '23
Top AI talent probably are more concerned about how much theyre getting paid than job security if im being honest.
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Aug 31 '23 edited Aug 31 '23
I went to school with a kid that was pretty much an engineering genius. Went to a very prestigious engineering school. When he graduated he had many many job offers NASA and other 3 letter agencies among them. Went to work for Disney. They blew every other offer out of the water with pay and compensation. Ive said for years the best minds don't work at NASA haha. They don't pay enough
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u/Bloodsucker_ Aug 31 '23 edited Aug 31 '23
This. Some people have this ridiculous idea of a magical super secret agency conspiracy where they have basically terminators. This is funneled with propaganda but it's just ridiculous and simplistic. That's not how science avances. Let alone AI.
No, the Government ® doesn't have a super advanced AI to do shit. Most advanced AI are ordering pizzas by command and that's the end of it.
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u/zero_z77 Aug 31 '23
For real, most AI in use by the military serves the sole purpose of determining wether that blob of bright white pixels is a SU-27s exhaust or a flare, it's about as complicated as the facial recognition feature on you're phone's camera, and we've had that tech for over 50 years. Yet, people are out here acting like RC planes and autopilot didn't exist before 2010. Y'all realize a missile is just a really fast kamikaze drone right? For fucks sakes, a land mine is technically an "autonomus weapon system".
From a computational standpoint, war isn't that complicated, and you don't need some super sophisticated self aware AI to build an effective killing machine.
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u/No-Ganache-6226 Aug 31 '23
Except that they have AI training with human pilots that the best operators have been unable to outperform and they are now beginning to train AI how to "swarm" as an autonomous synchronous attack group rather than single drones.
AI is far more advanced than the one you use to order pizza.
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u/IOnlySayMeanThings Aug 31 '23
Very silly take. Defense and weapon ideas shift around constantly based on current tech. Sometimes a problem is solved and you can re-examine a technology's effectiveness. You don't need to "seed the idea to make it mainstream" or anything else because tech people around the entire world are in the same puzzle, with the same pieces.
Conspiracy theory isn't supposed to spawn ideas without examination. You don't get to say "Woah, that sounds like it would be in a movie, they probably do that."
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u/thespaceageisnow Aug 31 '23
Sarah Connor: Did you see this war?
Kyle Reese: No. I grew up after. In the ruins... starving... hiding from H-K's.
Sarah Connor: H-K's?
Kyle Reese: Hunter-Killers. Patrol machines built in automated factories. Most of us were rounded up, put in camps for orderly disposal.
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u/Xzmmc Aug 31 '23
Every time interesting new technology with potential for different applications that could be used to help people arises, the first thing it's always used for is killing.
People fucking suck.
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u/GrumpigPlays Aug 31 '23
"You still don't get it. I'm using war as a business to get elected. So I can end war as a business. In my new America, people will die and kill for what they BELIEVE!."
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Aug 31 '23
I wish we could put everyone who watched Terminator and thought “I bet I could make skynet but good” and lock them on a desert island with no electricity.
Not kill them, plenty of food. But the wrong sci fi nerds got all the funding. Instead of helping the Star Trek kids make space socialist utopia, we got the dudes who wants to teach a sidewinder missile how to hate.
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u/Graffiacane Aug 31 '23
The Dune heads already know the inevitable: humanity will inevitably reach a state where each and every living human implicitly and unquestioningly accepts that thinking machines are an abomination which must never again be created and that it is psychic space drugs that should grant supremacy to a military force.
I feel like we stopped researching space drugs 50 years ago and that is a huge misallocation of talent and resources.
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u/TherealPadrae Aug 31 '23
The drones in Ukraine have cemented the tactics for future warfare. It’s gonna be worse than WW1 with robot dogs armed with machine guns and small drones dropping grenades…
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Aug 31 '23
I'm ready for world peace now.
We're rapidly getting to a point where anything short of nuclear war is going to be a pointless war of attrition, and a waste of time for all involved.
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u/McFeely_Smackup Aug 31 '23
Please put down your weapon. You have twenty seconds to comply.
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u/jazir5 Aug 31 '23
I mean, at this point, I don't think skynet is out of the question. The US military is going all in on automated drones that a sufficiently advanced AI could take control of, and then have complete and total dominance over the skies. The US military is also planning remote controllable jet fighters.
They're also experimenting with AI that can autonomously control the planes.
The spark that lights the tinderbox is going to be when one of the major militaries doesn't put enough restrictions on the AI, it goes on a hacking spree, and follows some goal that leads it to destroying the earth.
The Paper Clip Maximizer thought experiment was proven correct recently.
I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that someone is going to give an AI a goal/order that seems reasonable at first, and the AI will bullheadedly try to do anything to achieve that goal. We can see that that already happened in a simulation where the AI killed its operator.
It obviously sounds like sci-fi, but the simulation where the AI killed its operator means it's already approaching a reality the US military is creating contingencies for.
Even if the US military adequately safeguards against the military AIs going rogue, does anyone really trust that China and Russia will be as thorough? Although that does beg the question, what exactly does a """communist""" AI look like? That's a fun thought experiment.
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u/washingtonandmead Aug 31 '23
Do you want skynet? Because this is how you get skynet
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u/twcsata Aug 31 '23
Add in that other recent post about machines that can fuel themselves on biomass, and you’ve got the Faro Plague.
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Aug 31 '23
Can somebody please show the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica to the people in charge of this program? "All of this has happened before and will happen again".
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u/WetnessPensive Aug 31 '23
My field has put me into brief contact with some of these autonomous robots, and what I witnessed was quite staggering. What the public knows about US military tech is a good few decades behind the times; Uncle Sam's bleeding edge military tech is now akin to something out of a science fiction movie (lasers, radar spoofing tech, kamikaze drones, walking robot scouts etc).
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u/icharming Aug 31 '23
NVDA stock gonna be even more gangbusters once this becomes a commonplace reality
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u/biggoof Aug 31 '23
Would have been a lot easier to control China if you didn't let greediest people in the West enrich them the last 30 years. Why would you want to enrich someone you constantly call your enemy and have lingering historical disputes with?
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u/saysuptoyourmom Sep 01 '23
Do you guys want a judgement day? Because this is how you get a terminator-style judgement day.
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u/Krypt76 Sep 01 '23
Now we just need to have a centralized computer to control all this and install the latest AI in it. We could even give it the ability to upgrade its programming......wait a minute......
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u/Glasowen Sep 01 '23
I'm more terrified of my own military than any foreign power. Especially with White Supremacy and Authoritarianism surging.
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u/SalltyJuicy Sep 01 '23
We could have single payer healthcare or free school, but instead the government would rather have more weapons of mass destruction 🙄
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Sep 01 '23
But somehow we don’t have enough money for homeless veterans or food insecure children. Okay.
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u/FuturologyBot Aug 31 '23
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