Elon Musk Nightmare Looms: Army Seeks “Internet-Of-Battlefield Things” With “Self-Aware” Bot Swarms
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Jul 19, 2017
After warning that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization,” the appearance of fully-automated ‘robot-killers’ brought Elon Musk’s apocalyptic vision even close.
As he noted, “until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” and while that is unlikely in the streets of America (for now), Defense One’s Patrick Turner writes that after nearly two decades of war against technologically unsophisticated foes, the Army Research Lab is reorienting to counter China and Russia – with distributed bot-swarms and an internet-of-battlefield things…
The Army Research Lab is turning more of its attention to fighting land wars against far more technologically sophisticated adversaries than it has in the past several decades. In the coming months, the Lab will fund new programs related to highly (but not fully) autonomous drones and robots that can withstand adversary electronic warfare operations. The Lab will also fund new efforts to develop battlefield communications and sensing networks that perform well against foes with advanced electronic warfare capabilities, according to Philip Perconti, who became the director of the Lab in June.
After nearly two decades of war against determined but technologically unsophisticated foes in the Middle East, U.S. Army tech has, in some ways, fallen behind that of competing states, according to a May report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies on U.S. Army modernization.
For instance, Russia has invested heavily in anti-access / area denial technologies meant to keep U.S. forces out of certain areas.
“There are regions in Donbass where no electromagnetic communications—including radio, cell phone, and television—work,” says the CSIS report.
“Electronic warfare is the single largest killer of Ukrainian systems by jamming either the controller or GPS signals.”
The Rest…HERE
