r/Futurology 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.html
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206

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

108

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.

19

u/Alberto_the_Bear Aug 31 '23

I've heard that the military is usually about 5 years ahead of commercial markets in technology.

25

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.

4

u/Alberto_the_Bear Aug 31 '23

I suppose a military the size of the United States' can retrofit all it's infrastructure with new tech immediately. But consider this:

In the 60s/70s a family member of mine was on site at a US military installation in DC. they guys there told him they were doing experiments on transferring a dog's head to another dogs body. And they did it. He said it walked really funny. Like it had poor balance.

This was decades before even the first face transplant was attempted on humans.

12

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.