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The United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) is currently evaluating a new generation of robotic "dogs" developed by Ghost Robotics, with the potential to be equipped with gun systems from defense tech company Onyx Industries, reports The War Zone.
[...] MARSOC is currently in possession of two armed Q-UGVs undergoing testing, as confirmed by Onyx Industries staff, and their gun systems are based on Onyx's SENTRY remote weapon system (RWS), which features an AI-enabled digital imaging system and can automatically detect and track people, drones, or vehicles, reporting potential targets to a remote human operator that could be located anywhere in the world. The system maintains a human-in-the-loop control for fire decisions, and it cannot decide to fire autonomously.
On LinkedIn, Onyx Industries shared a video of a similar system in action.
[...] The prospect of deploying armed robotic dogs, even with human oversight, raises significant questions about the future of warfare and the potential risks and ethical implications of increasingly autonomous weapons systems. There's also the potential for backlash if similar remote weapons systems eventually end up used domestically by police. Such a concern would not be unfounded: In November 2022, we covered a decision by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to allow the San Francisco Police Department to use lethal robots against suspects.
Previously on SoylentNews:
You Can Now Buy a Flame-Throwing Robot Dog for Under $10,000 - 20240426
San Francisco Decides Killer Police Robots Aren't Such a Great Idea - 20221208
(Score: 4, Insightful) by wannabegeek2 on Saturday May 11 2024, @12:50PM (9 children)
You want the Terminator, this is how you start down the path to the Terminator.
Humanity will not survive.
Never ascribe to malice or conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or ignorance
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Saturday May 11 2024, @06:57PM (8 children)
Sad thing, I do not see how this is avoidable. The military wants AI badly. And it wants to fight wars. Even if they could contain themselves, eventually some terrorists will get hold of the technology.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Saturday May 11 2024, @09:06PM (4 children)
When we can fight wars without risking any human lives on our side, it removes the reason the people have to care. Even before we start worrying about Terminators, that part is scary enough for me.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 12 2024, @01:07AM
Lives are risked when more of a country's production goes to fighting wars instead of keeping its people alive and healthy. Of course it takes a lot more for more US people to starve ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org] ) and poorer diets and healthcare is the norm for the US people: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-falling-202210202835 [harvard.edu]
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/25/1164819944/live-free-and-die-the-sad-state-of-u-s-life-expectancy [npr.org]
Also, those who get targeted might decide to take the war to the USA. It's not easy to smuggle people into the USA, but might still be easier than building missiles etc.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by shrewdsheep on Sunday May 12 2024, @12:07PM (2 children)
I believe that will never happen. Both sides will have AI and can wreak maximal havoc. A proxy war between AIs is illusory also, as the losing side will change tactics and involve infrastructure/people.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Sunday May 12 2024, @08:52PM (1 child)
When was the last time the US fought a war against an actual symmetrical power? WWII?
Korea and Vietnam were proxy conflicts, and Afghanistan and Iraq we basically went in and wrecked the place, then it settled into asymmetric warfare. Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya...we're already in the age of the drone, they're just not autonomous yet.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday May 13 2024, @02:12PM
The US Air Force Is Moving Fast on AI-Piloted Fighter Jets [wired.com]
US aims to stay ahead of China in using AI to fly fighter jets, navigate without GPS and more [apnews.com]
The ability to use autonomous drones, fighters, etc. is already here.
Also, this thing: I'm dropping out of flight school! - HOVERAir X1 [youtube.com]
The Dystopian future of Minority Report (the movie) is already here. It had autonomous drones and it only took us 20 years or so to reach that Sci-Fi Dystopian tech level.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Sunday May 12 2024, @04:26PM (2 children)
As I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead? ...
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. ...
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way. Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working")."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday May 13 2024, @01:57AM (1 child)
The obvious rebuttal here: how are the "security" agencies able to do that? Answer: power is still scarce. The mindset of scarcity is backed by a reality of scarcity.
(Score: 2) by pdfernhout on Monday May 13 2024, @05:06PM
Some ideas from me circa 2011 on how security agencies can build a more secure world:
"The need for FOSS intelligence tools for sensemaking etc."
https://web.archive.org/web/20130514103318/http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/-The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc.-/76207-8319 [archive.org]
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security.
I feel open source tools for collaborative structured arguments, multiple perspective analysis, agent-based simulation, and so on, used together for making sense of what is going on in the world, are important to our democracy, security, and prosperity. Imagine if, instead of blog posts and comments on topics, we had searchable structured arguments about simulations and their results all with assumptions defined from different perspectives, where one could see at a glance how different subsets of the community felt about the progress or completeness of different arguments or action plans (somewhat like a debate flow diagram), where even a year of two later one could go back to an existing debate and expand on it with new ideas. As good as, say, Slashdot is, such a comprehensive open source sensemaking system would be to Slashdot as Slashdot is to a static webpage. It might help prevent so much rehashing the same old arguments because one could easily find and build on previous ones. ...
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach. ..."
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.