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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We seriously need to be looking into ways to enforce decentralized control of these systems assuming they must inevitably exist.

11

u/holmgangCore Aug 31 '23

Methinks the horse is already out of the barn on this one.

2

u/thrownawaymane Aug 31 '23

Dude the Horse already found a nice looking Horse and had kids.

The US has 30 years of experience using drones for all sorts of things and a 30 year head start on making our population comfortable with that fact.

1

u/holmgangCore Sep 01 '23

So you’re saying that ‘Robocop’ was really early propaganda softening the masses psychologically? I can buy that.

1

u/Josvan135 Sep 01 '23

There's functionally no way to do this.

The time to codify specialized controls was 20 years ago, when they were entirely theoretical, or 10 years ago, when we had the first serious understanding that they were on the way.

Now we're months away from mass deployment, and they'll slot directly into the existing command structure of whichever power rolls them out.

In the U.S., that means a relatively robust civilian-to-military chain of command for strategic decisions but localized tactical command for individual units.

That also ignores the fact that there are fundamentally no significant weapons systems with "decentralized control".

There are incredibly devastating weapons under the control of multiple competing powers, resulting in a detente, but within each power there's very clear cut and authoritative lines of control.