Robot Wars
I am increasingly alarmed by the swift progress Japanese car makers have
been making in the relatively new field of “autonomous robotics”. There
are now several distinct ’species’ of upright-walking robots who look more
and more like the classic Terminator of 1980 Hollywood fame to me. I mentioned this previously here. Bipedal robots on the battlefield may be a nightmare of my own imagining, but according to comments made to Nature reporter Philip Ball by Ray Kurzweil at the 24th Army Science Conference in Orlando after his keynote address, swarms of autonomous killing machines may not be as sci-fi (or as far off in the future) as you may think.
Ray Kurzweil is no crackpot. He was the principal developer of OCR (optical character recognition), the CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer. His surname should not be unfamiliar to musicians either, as he has made important contributions in music synthesis. He has earned many MIT awards of excellence and has written several best sellers, including “When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence”. His upcoming book, coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D. is entitled “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever” which sounds apocryphal. Ray’s work touches so many different areas its difficult to pigeon-hole him, but you might call him an Inventor.
According to the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, citing a New York Times story, the Pentagon is pouring $127 billion dollars into the development of ‘Artificial Intelligence Warriors’. Kurzweil suggests that it may only be 20 years before an army commander will be issuing an order to a ’swarm’ of weapons to “Take that Hill”. The idea of a “swarm” of autonomous, artificially intelligent, self-organizing, solar-powered robotic killing machines unleashed to fight our battles remotely may seem like science fiction to you. If you have been playing any “Real-Time-Strategy” computer games over the last 10 years, you know that the idea at least is not new and the artifical intelligence (what gamers call “AI”) has been getting better every year. The move from 2D gaming to 3D application may not be that far off. The robots that end up getting fielded may not be the upright-walking humanoid variety with cutesey names like ‘Asimo by Honda’, but the US just better hope it still has some manufacturing plants and engineers left to produce their own version of whatever ends up getting used first. History is replete with stories of how new technologies have turned the tide of battle.
Comment posted on 3-3-2005
I can see autonomous attack robots coming. Our current war techniques
have shifted from man-on-man to guided missles thrown from far away.
This has saved a lot of American lives, probably caused a lot of
collateral damage, and made war a whole lot easier for us to engage in.
The natural progression is to send something other than living American
soldiers in for the cleanup stage. This will happen, the tech is not that far
off. I’d guess non-autonomous versions will happen within 20 years or so.
To be fair, my Pops has made a point in the past that civilian casualties in
something like the war in Iraq are far lower, in percentage, than in WWII.
Of course we don’t just bomb cities anymore either.
Making war nearly bloodless from our perspective is very scary though.
Comment posted on 11-2-2005
Ray was on Charlie Rose tonight discussing some of the things from his new book ‘The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology’. I found
another recent interview with him on instapundit.
Although I don’t agree with all of his ideas about where humans will be in 2020-2030, it’s classic sci-fi to try to predict and make educated guesses about the future. Take it for what it’s worth.