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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday September 03 2017, @10:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the judgment-day dept.

In a televised event, Russia's President Vladimir Putin spoke to a group of students about a number of topics, including AI and drones:

Russian president Vladimir Putin spoke about the potential power of artificial intelligence to students on Friday, saying "the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world," according to Associated Press. He then said "it would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position," indicating that Russia would cooperate with other countries in the development of AI. While Russia is seen as skilled in technological propaganda, it has little presence in mainstream AI research.

Putin also envisioned a future for war where drones, ostensibly controlled by artificial intelligence, would fight proxy wars between countries. "When one party's drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender," he said.

Russian companies have been actively researching autonomous weapons, such as drones, robots and missiles, which would be able to pick targets and fire on their own. Documents from the US military show similar strategies, where swarms of drones would assist troops with real-time intelligence gathering and air support.

Putin puts on his Musk hat:

Putin touched on the topic of space technologies, hoping that space travel technology could one day be used in passenger travel, though not necessarily for journeys into outer space. He described the slashing of flight time from Russia's westernmost major city, Kaliningrad, to its easternmost, Vladivostok, as "a dream."

As far as space travel is concerned, Putin told students that there is hope for life on other planets in our Solar System.

"The flight to Mars would take no less than half a year, maybe even more," Putin said. "If you fly to Mars and buried yourself somewhere in there, then you could exist for some period of time. But you have to dig yourself in because cells simply die on the surface," he warned pupils.

Also at the New York Post and VOA.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @03:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04 2017, @03:22PM (#563470)

    Depends very much on the robots we're talking about.
    Even without fancy AI, if you have good enough image recognition algorithms with sufficient CPU power and correspondingly fast&exact robotics, you can build a soldier robot that walks around and analyses its surroundings with a 100 FPS camera in real time. If a human soldier so much as tries to peek around a corner, the robot could recognise, target and shoot him in the part of the face that is showing before even the pupil of the first eye is in sight. Which leaves the humans zero chance in a traditional combat scenario.

    We could loosen the tolerances and give enough time for the human to fully peek around the corner, wait for his slow meatbrain to process the image, and maybe even the quarter second it takes for the electrochemical signal to reach his fingers. Kinect claims recognition between 0.2 sec (worst case) and 5 ms (predictive best case), and our robotics guys can do marker retargeting (albiet with lightweight fine machinery and small angles) 20+ times per second.
    So even putting together today's technology could result in plenty of dead humans per robot in a close combat scenario. You can come up with superiority scenarios for deser/aearial/naval/... warfare yourself ;)

    Sure it has to be hacking proof, supported by long distance regonition&surveillance, etc. but the point is: drop an advanced killer robot (or, say, a thousand, but one might be enough) as described in my first paragraph into a city, and you'll soon agree that once one side's machines are taken out, surrender is the only reasonable option.