The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has invested some of its resources into a robot that's been trained—likely among other things—to identify humans. There's just one little problem: The robot is cartoonishly easy to confuse.
Army veteran, former Pentagon policy analyst, and author Paul Scharre is gearing up to release a new book called Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Despite the fact that the book isn't scheduled to hit shelves until Feb. 28, Twitter users are already sharing excerpts via social media. This includes The Economist's defense editor, Shashank Joshi, who shared a particularly laughable passage on Twitter.
In the excerpt, Scharre describes a week during which DARPA calibrated its robot's human recognition algorithm alongside a group of US Marines. The Marines and a team of DARPA engineers spent six days walking around the robot, training it to identify the moving human form. On the seventh day, the engineers placed the robot at the center of a traffic circle and devised a little game: The Marines had to approach the robot from a distance and touch the robot without being detected.
DARPA was quickly humbled. Scharre writes that all eight Marines were able to defeat the robot using techniques that could have come straight out of a Looney Tunes episode. Two of the Marines somersaulted toward the center of the traffic circle, thus using a form of movement the robot hadn't been trained to identify. Another pair shuffled toward the robot under a cardboard box. One Marine even stripped a nearby fir tree and was able to reach the robot by walking "like a fir tree" (the meaning of which Twitter users are still working to figure out).
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2023, @04:48PM (7 children)
John Boyd "A Discourse on Winning and Losing"
Boyd fought the Air Force brass to create the F-15 and F-16 fighters because of the disaster in
Vietnam that was the kitchen sink F-111 porkbarrel.
Same for the A-10 warthog for the Army they initially didn't want.
Fast forward and now we have killer-bots anything with an actual functional
human intelligence can defeat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2023, @05:25PM
> porkbarrel
I think here we have the infinite money faucet. We can't afford to risk the Ruskies developing a super robot killer first so we have to spend, spend, spend on shitty AI forever.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2023, @05:29PM (1 child)
> Fast forward
Remember, this is DARPA, the "AR" means "Advanced Research". Give them another few years and that 'bot will be peppering holes in cardboard boxes that move. In fact, Roomba's with a box on top will be the next diversion the Marines try...
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 27 2023, @06:16PM
Yeah, but every fir tree in the neighborhood will be dead when the bot passes through.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Friday January 27 2023, @09:22PM (1 child)
There are some strong (and intoxicated) opinions on John Boyd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZDfdCj61dY [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Saturday January 28 2023, @01:56AM
LaserPig is just the opposition's John Boyd: Where the Boyds were obsessed with ground support and fighters, the other guys are obsessed with stealth and long range missiles / bombs. Both sides disregard one role or the other.
The result of this selective myopia is that the F35 supporters ignore the implications of their own arguments: If drones are the future and obsolete dog-fighting, they also obsolete the whole concept of the F35 as a weapon platform. To be brief, a modern air craft should be a two sitter that focuses on speed and/or stealth without carrying any weapons. Instead, the back-sitter should be focused on operating a separate drone / swarm that is per-mission speced. That would leave both the meatbag-platform and the drone/s with maximum maneuverability, airtime and minimal radar footprint while putting the fly boys safely at the back where G-forces and whatnot isn't' a factor.
It's basically the air force repeating the main battle tank army circus: One camp is arguing for light APCs with machine guns while the other camp wants even more expensive active defense (lasers and composite armors)... Both, disregarding the plain-to-see fact that shoulder missiles and buggies net you better mobility and can (and have been for the last 40 years or so) take down those $50 million tanks at $2000 a pop.
As the saying goes, the military never fail to prepare for the previous war.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2023, @09:33PM (1 child)
how is this in any way Flamebait
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2023, @10:41PM
Any mention of Boyd or that the military industrial feeding trough might not
be the best for a functional fighting force triggers their collars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by istartedi on Friday January 27 2023, @06:00PM (1 child)
Maybe this system could be defeated by The Bangles [youtube.com].
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday January 27 2023, @06:06PM
"Solid" idea, considering the Egyptians were also big on snakes [fandom.com].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday January 27 2023, @06:19PM (2 children)
The cardboard box and the fir tree are good enough to fool humans. And, the somesaulting may even confuse a human for a couple precious seconds. Unless you've spent years practicing to 'expect the unexpected', even an unusual mode of locomotion can degrade your response time.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday January 27 2023, @07:30PM
Which circles back around to Looney Tunes [youtu.be].
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 27 2023, @09:09PM
Yeah, but real men get past that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQKrmDLvijo [youtube.com]
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday January 27 2023, @07:53PM (3 children)
Good results. There will not be 1 of these. there will be hundreds or thousands. as well as robots in the sky. it's a robot, it's cheaper than training a human. I guess here's hoping you can isolate them 1 by 1 and pick them off?
Drones, autonomous, "loitering munitions" is the most modern evolution of the technological offset strategy. No organization of human soldiers will be able to stand against it. It's going to be an absolute bloodbath similar to trench warfare in WWI. This new strat is going to make all previous mechanized warfare obsolete.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 27 2023, @09:13PM
Well, here's the problem with that theory: Global (Solar System Wide?) networks and adaptive learning. Fool me once with a cardboard box, once I _do_ notice that trick and learn it, training ALL the robots happens very quickly. Signed: The Robots.
Yeah, that's exactly how we're going to inject a virus and bring you all down. Signed: Hollywood 100x over, particularly Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day.
Are we going to trust that real humans are as "smaht" as Jeff Goldblum's fictional character?
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday January 27 2023, @09:30PM
More importantly, it won't balk when you give it illegal or unethical orders to execute. Y'know, that last pesky stumbling block constraining militaries from doing whatever they please.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 27 2023, @10:44PM
If the situation is that dire, a tactical EMP would be deployed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by looorg on Friday January 27 2023, @09:22PM (1 child)
At least someone played Metal Gear Solid. Clearly not the bot or any of the DARPA geniuses ... It's such a common trick in the game that it even reached meme-status.
https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Cardboard_box [fandom.com]
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Saturday January 28 2023, @01:09AM
Came here for the MGS references. I was not disappointed.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Saturday January 28 2023, @03:28AM (1 child)
Y'all call us dumb, but I assure you we are absolute geniuses at fucking something up. Point us at it and watch- we will break it.
The thing that makes us dangerous isn't that we are crazy- its how much we enjoy it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 28 2023, @09:53PM
I hired some Marines once to remove a rodent nest at my condo. That they did, and my only regret is not listening to their suggestion to use concrete--I was reluctant to pour concrete against the side of the building because I was concerned the city might charge me with an expensive code violation for unpermitted construction, or the association might hold me liable or some other such nonsense (this was in DC, town full of lawyers). Sure enough, the rats eventually got back in through a hole in a railroad tie that I didn't realize was big enough. The concrete would have stopped it. I should have listened to the Marines. Not only were they brave enough to excavate a hole full of urban rats and send them scurrying, they were smart enough to know how to complete the job.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 28 2023, @08:02PM
Butter to margarine... no, those are more similar.
Milk to artificial milk? Nope, still too alike for a comparison.
Compressed fiberboard to wood? Well, it takes real intelligence to fake it in a machine.
Remember, in the 1952 elections, Dan Rather called ENIAC an "electronic brain" and it stuck. A Hallmark greeting card is a more powerful computer.
Mad at your neighbors? Join ICE, $50,000 signing bonus and a LICENSE TO MURDER!