Robotic Warfare Has Arrived – 30% of US Military Aircraft are Drones

No, I'd settle for an AI that exhibited even the self-determination and learning ability of a common ant or honey bee. Especially if all you are going to do with it is stick it in a missile and blow people up. We have nothing like this, nothing.

I know because I associate with cyberneticists, software engineers and biologists who have made this their life's work and who are engaged on this day in, day out.

Truly independent strong AI's are a pipe dream. At least for now. And merely throwing money at the problem won't by itself solve that. Digital computers as we know them and by themselves will not give us what we want. And why it is IMPERATIVE that AIs must be Asimov machines or at least can recognise friend or foe ... or else we are all in big trouble. The facts are we have nothing like this, nor does it seem anything too promising in that direction. Even humans aren't all that good at it if the stories of "friendly fire" are anything to go by. But I suppose you are saying "collateral damage" is a worthwhile price to pay for trying to develop AI's? Try explaining that on the six-o'clock news when a "safe" prototype AI drone malfunctions in a city full of your own people. Or even in a battlefield scenario.

I suggest you read the work of people like Blay Whitby and Kyran Dale (University of Sussex School of Cognitive and computing Sciences) for some practical background.

"with a large enough lookup table you could simulate every action an individual could take"

Oh dear. That's Artificial Intelligence Day 1. It also doesn't work. That isn't an AI. There's also the slight dual problems of Nyquist and Shannon limits which dictate why this can't physically work in a digital system. But never mind. You seem to know that it is possible and it that's how to do it. No amount of prior research since 1948 onwards will be of any use to you.

You already have the answer. Its all just a matter of brute-force computing power and nothing else. Its that unsubtle, is it? Geee -- what a waste of time! All these years and it was just a matter of a big enough look up table. What a fool everyone has been not to just realise that!

So c'mon then, where is your fully functional robotic AI? Keeping it a secret isn't fair to the rest of us.

Did you consider any of these:

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=artificial+intelligenc...

And this one's a doozy: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?filename=0&...

And they're just scratching the surface of a very deep field of research.

It does indeed apply to humans. If you could be bothered to read the rest of this thread you'd see that this is precisely the point I am trying to make.

Humans are machines. But we (and other living things) appear to exhibit defined properties that are not present in complex digital machines. It also seems that what we refer to as self-awareness is an emergent property that living things have, although in theory, not specifically limited to living things.

That set of properties is what is formally defined as having a mind. Whatever that means, and I agree its far from clear what that is.

But -- and its a big but -- digital processes don't seem to be able to mimic or model it (that could be our shortcoming -- the models are not any good) and it isn't just a matter of more memory/processing power/a big enough look-up table. These are not the problem nor the answer. It isn't just a CompSci issue. If it were just that, we would have it licked by now and we would all have interchangeable minds that we could simply reprogram and upload with new sets of skills and belief systems (yes, Robots would definitely need them too, by the way).

We have a long way to go and for a while now we've been heading down the wrong road. But don't take my word for it.

The ability for a 'pilot' to specify they want surveillance of some area and a drone fly's around pointing a camera at that area is a little more complex than simple autopilot. Classic reconnaissance aircraft often had multiple people to handle all of the complexity's involved, moving to having less than one person per plane and doing the same job takes a lot of automation. That said, something like the MQ-1 Predator actually uses multiple people on the ground due to this issue as does the MQ-9 Reaper which can do autonomous flight operations. But, both systems use multiple aircraft at the same time and have less than one controller per aircraft.

http://www.af.mil/information/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=64...

Just pointing out that 'autonomy' can mean different things depending on your point of view. The kind of autonomy that has already been achieved coupled to a reasonably safe ability to operate in congested air space will mean that regular autonomous cargo flights will become possible.

As for aerial refuelling, I think autonomous probe & drogue refuelling is definitely feasible. They've already proven the ability of the X-47B's flight systems to maintain the refuelling position behind a 707, which is technically one of the harder things to get right.

One of the reasons aerial refuelling is so tricky is that it requires constant rapid adjustments by the pilot in the receiving aircraft to stay in position while receiving fuel. The X-47B should be able to process those adjustments much faster than a human pilot.