I thought of this after reading this article last week in the Houston Chronicle. But my concern is they actually find this rational.Correspondent: General, we're told of wonder weapons the Germans were working on: Long-range rockets, push-button bombing weapons that don't need soldiers. What's your take on that?
Patton: "Wonder weapons?" My God, I don't see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics. Nothing is glorified? Nothing is reaffirmed? No heroes, no cowards, no troops, no generals. Only those who are left alive and those who are left... dead. I won't live to see it.
Pentagon may win race over self-driving vehicles
The Pentagon may soon be competing with Tesla and its Model S P90D on self-driving vehicles.
Forget Uber, Waymo and Tesla: The next big name in self-driving vehicles could be the Pentagon.
“We’re going to have self-driving vehicles in theater for the Army before we’ll have self-driving cars on the streets,” Michael Griffin, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told lawmakers this month at a hearing on Capitol Hill. “But the core technologies will be the same.”
The stakes for the military are high. Fifty-two percent of casualties in combat zones can been attributed to military personnel delivering food, fuel and other logistics, Griffin said. Removing people from that equation with systems run on artificial intelligence could reduce injuries and deaths significantly.
“You’re in a very vulnerable position when you’re doing that kind of activity,” Griffin said. “If that can be done by an automated unmanned vehicle with a relatively simple AI driving algorithm where I don’t have to worry about pedestrians and road signs and all of that, why wouldn’t I do that?”
The Pentagon has a long history of support that helped to develop or refine key technologies that become widespread later, including space flight and the internet.
With an annual budget of almost $700 billion, the Pentagon can afford to aggressively pursue autonomous vehicle technology well beyond fuel and food delivery trucks. The Army, for instance, is pushing forward with efforts to develop unmanned tanks and smarter vehicles for bomb disarmament, though many of those technologies will be remote-controlled, not autonomous.
Maj. Alan L. Stephens, an officer at the Mounted Requirements Division of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence in Georgia, said in December that the Army wants to start testing light, fast remote-controlled tanks with the same firepower as the current 70-plus-ton manned M1 Abrams tank within the next five years.
Among critics’ concerns is the potential development of autonomous weapons that make their own life-and-death targeting decisions. Ash Carter, who was defense secretary under President Barack Obama, told a Silicon Valley audience in 2016 that “in the matter of the use of lethal force, there will always be — at least speaking for the United States — a human being involved in decision-making...”
The rest of the article has some comments on the legality of using this technology in combat. I question the wisdom of using it on a widespread basis, period. While using a form of this for logistics is very plausible, I have serious issue with the thought of AI replacing man in something as fast moving and complicated as battle. No form of artificial intelligence will replace the intellect, knowledge base, initiative, and intuition of a man on the battlefield. Can I see something like a “suicide submersible” being used to attach itself on a ship and detonate, yes. But a computer guided ship having to make a decision on planting an explosive on a hull, when it may be compromised, absolutely not. Also, the potential for compromised computers or communications would be a literal “war stopper.”
I am not a fantasy believer in automated cars. The technology is still decades away, man driven autos are going nowhere. And I will never see the end manned aircraft, armored vehicles, etc.
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