DARPA project reveals one person can control dozens of robots
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
This will surprise nobody who has watched professional Starcraft players.
I can't decide if that would be cool or terrifying.
There is something deeply, darkly comedic (depressing?) about the qualitative language here. Primarily the way it simultaneously intersects with modern discourse around wellness, anxiety, and mental health in such a banal manner at the same time as the latent/implicit violence of action (given that the obvious subtext is operating semi-autonomous killing machines).
There are benefits to being pushed past your limits from time to time. Also, there's just no such thing as 0. When you're designing limits you don't say "this never happens", you're saying "this event happens less than this rate for this cohort".
That would mean leaving some performance on the table the rest of the time.
It doesn't seem clear at all whether one outweighs the other.
You of course don't want to become comfortable and complacent, risking losing focus, but there must be better ways of avoiding that other than being occasionally overwhelmed.
I don’t see how that could lead to a credible proof, even on the balance of probabilities.
But until you can present at least one such example scenario, no individual would be willing to take such a risk when their own life is at stake. Real combatants might value the motivating threat of being overwhelmed, but do not actually wish to be overwhelmed (i.e. have their OODA loop compromised).
In deadly combat, no one is looking to theorize. No one quibbles about their inability to prove the negative. They just want to live to see the next day.
Otherwise your comment doesn’t make sense.
Or is that meant to be metaphorical?
We’re talking about a soldier. Commanding a company’s worth of firepower single-handedly from relative safety. 3% would be an exceptional improvement over the status quo.
E.g. to decrease 3pct to 0.3pct might require operating only half the drones -- not a good trade.
>discourse around wellness, anxiety, and mental health in such a banal manner
It's not about "feelings" and that might disturb you, but really very many things should be much less about feelings. A whole lot of "wellness, anxiety, and mental health" isn't about feelings but instead being inside or outside the limits of what a person is capable of handling. Facts-based analysis of work and life and people being too far outside their comfort zone could do a lot for many people dealing with mental health issues.
DARPA does and obviously _needs to_ study these things. One of the most important areas for this are pilots especially during emergencies. It comes from both directions, designing the machine to be manageable and training the human to manage in exceptional circumstances and _knowing the limits_ of both.
I don’t really think I was moralizing… just commenting on the funny juxtaposition of the language and the context - or on the comedy of the language specifically when not considering the whole context. I was not saying DARPA should or should not be doing this - though I’ll grant that what I wrote could be read as an implicit criticism, even though it was not my intention.
> I don't see UX experts hand-wringing about the effects of advertising when they're designing their products.
Plenty do. Plenty don’t. Similarly, plenty of machine learning engineers might choose not to work on, say, a predictive algorithm for facial recognition or a product recommender system because they don’t feel like being a part of that system. Some people don’t have that luxury, or don’t care. It’s fine either way, though I of course encourage anyone to do some reflection on the social implications of their engineering projects from time to time. Hamming, who worked on everything from the ABomb to telephones to the foundations of computer programming (and everything in between) strongly recommends this, and I agree. Working on weapons might be necessary, but you still need to reflect and make a conscious decision about it.
> It's not about "feelings" […] It comes from both directions, designing the machine to be manageable and training the human to manage in exceptional circumstances and _knowing the limits_ of both.
Of course, totally understand that. That doesn’t mean we can’t find humor in decontextualizing the language! Or in thinking about how science always must struggle with euphemism for the purposes of concision.
They did
https://oibr.uga.edu/low-to-moderate-levels-of-stress-can-be...
This seems misleading- what they said is that when everything is on cruise control the commander does not feel overwhelmed. But if they have to do some high cognitive load task (like reading statuses) or react to a complex situation the commander will feel overwhelmed, which is bad. We want to be able to react quickly and appropriately to all situations, which we can't do when overwhelmed. Being able to handle dozens of bots in a calm situation is meaningless. We need to staff our bot controllers/monitors/commanders at a level that they can handle those top 3% complex wartime scenarios.
Following up on GP's analogy, I read this as "human overwhelmed by micro" and "human overwhelmed by macro", which... tracks.
From my own StarCraft experience, the two most taxing parts of the game - the ones where I could easily get confused and lose track of the battle, or even forget what I was doing and why, were:
1) Micro, i.e. "generating new multiple new tactics" on the fly, manually controlling a bunch of units, whose survival depended entirely on me being able to do it faster than my opponent.
2) Macro, i.e. "inspecting which vehicles in the launch zone were available for deployment" and deploying them, while queuing production of new ones - while trying to keep track of the front line(s) and spot potential sneak attacks and overall pay attention to the whole map. "Macro management" is easy when it's the only thing you do - but when there's a battle going on, you end up looking at a different part of the map for a second, every second; it basically becomes a form of "micro", except you're micromanaging your attention.
In both cases, the source of the overwhelm is the pressure of battle - things are changing so fast that few seconds can decide the fate of the battle, possibly of the overall game - but the battles between peers can drag on for minutes, requiring you to sustain that level of focus for extended time, and keep it split between the fighting and the base management; as there too, few seconds of error can put you at a large disadvantage down the line.
All this to say - I'm not a soldier, so I might be wrong, but I feel that real-life warfare, at least now, isn't this fast-paced. That may change in drone vs. drone scenarios, but with humans on the ground, I imagine taking it slow and methodical will remain the dominant approach.
Based on this, I also think "overwhelmed" might be editorialized language added by the reporter.
Besides, I'd prefer a Supreme Commander interface where patrol points can be added/deleted/moved on the fly while factories produce more into that loop including ferry points along the way. Supreme Commander made me feel it was more about strategy than action count.
That 3 percent is definitely the part where the innocent people are killed
Israel does path finding for what the U.S. military can get away with.
But seriously, isn't this just a function of how much babysitting the robots require and how good the UI is for controlling them? I don't see why there should be any fundamental limits here.
I'd better start carrying fish nets with me. If this is how it's going to be then I'd rather go down trying.
In other news, MANHAAAAAAACKS
EMP is what my ignorance in electronics suggests. But to be fair, people like you and me have no recourse against drone technology.