The US Army is developing autonomous armored vehicles
armytimes.com
armytimes.com
That which controls the wrench controls fate.
/seriousness
Much better to focus on science, and technology and grow peacefully.
Probably with less casualties overall...
Oh wait, it's the present.
Imagine Iraq occupied with pretty much only machines and Iraqis never actually see an American. And if this removes the threat of death from one side, what does that do to the cost of war? Could it actually make it more common because it is less politically risky? It feels inevitable, but it also scares me.
Other countries are more willing to lose soldiers but refrain from war for other reasons: the economic cost, fear of losing, loss of standing in the international community, or simply having no enemy they particularly want to fight.
Also, why just other countries? Asymmetrical (class) warfare is very popular, here, now. I don't see the kind of people waging it having moral setbacks about other kinds.
Civilian casualties have been a big part of war. It seems too soon to say an automated army won't have the potential to massively increase civilian casualties given that it lowers the cost to the attacker and robot don't care if they engage in atrocities, etc.
When you have to put your own humans in a combat situation, you think twice before sending your men to their potential doom. With robots and unmanned vehicles, you can just keep throwing them at the problem, cost is the only concern.
If the source of a country's military might is the ability of the civilian population to produce goods needed for the war effort, then the civilian population becomes a legitimate target.
The result of that logic in WW II was mass bombing campaigns which were capable of "dehousing" 100k+ people in a single night.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPnppCelvk0 for an hour long documentary on how our world came to accept such logic as reasonable.
There was a fairly impressive display from Russian manufacturers of all kinds of autonomous mobile fighting units and fixed sentry emplacements recently. So it appears not building them is no longer an option. Some of them were even new.
I seem to recall Stanford used a far less intimidating VW SUV instead of a giant Humvee.
Or have I been reading too much SciFi?
And those that shoot at allies. And those that haven't shot yet, but are aiming in the wrong direction. And those that are just reloading their mortar. And those that are setting up an explosive trap for the robot.
There are a lot of ways to be hostile that go beyond firing a weapon directly at the robot, and if it can't handle those, it will be exploited by humans pretending to be harmless.
I'd say that's sarcastic, but I sadly expect such reasoning from much of the US military leadership these days.
That reminds me of a classic scene from the original Robocop:
Yeah, how exactly can that be automated?
> Yeah, how exactly can that be automated?
Be it known that we, JOHN M. BROWNING and Marrana' S. Browning, of Ogden, in the county of Weber and Territory of Utah, have invented a new Improvement in Magazine Guns; and we do hereby declare the following [...] an improvement in the construction of guns whereby the firing of the gun after the first discharge may be made automatic so long as cartridges shall be supplied. [1892]
Much of the technology is there to drive robotics and autonomy into maneuver formations, but when it comes to developing the tactics, techniques and procedures, the Army is figuring out “how we want to massage this,” said Robert Sadowski, robotics chief with the Army‘s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center. “The next 10 to 15 years will help us figure out how we want to embed robotics and autonomous systems into the formation.”
http://www.defensenews.com/land/2017/08/25/us-army-tackles-t...
Also, combat zones != California suburbs.
We're just going to leave that one tee'd up, aren't we?
I'm 95% certain that each one of the vehicles there was produced by contractors for a government agency (and if these particular vehicles weren't, certainly such contracts do exist- I used to work on one). If Google wanted to compete for a contract it certainly could, but its experience isn't particularly helpful in attacking the problem set that the Army is interested in.