The Robots are Coming (DoD to replace one fourth of soldiers with bots by 2030)
- Thread starter tad10
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What we need are big robotic pit bulls that clamp on to the back of the terrorists necks and violently sodomize them to death, streaming the whole thing to live tv. Psychological warfare bitches! After watching a few of their homies getting corn-holed to death by the Fuckatron-9000, the terrorists might re-think their career choices.
If war is going to be fought by robots, what are we going to do with the poor, marginally educated, and immigrants that make upa partof the fighting forces? There are only so many fast food jobs.
Mist
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The biggest problem I see with drones in the future is hacking their input/output streams. Especially their output. You can only shove so much processing power on a drone to keep it light and using low amounts of battery power. That limits the amount of encrytpion/decryption they can do in real time. Break the output streams of drones and you can tell where they are. Hack the input streams and... welp...
I've heard its already fairly trivial to view the video output of some drones currently in operation.
I've heard its already fairly trivial to view the video output of some drones currently in operation.
Tuco
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Yeah, a lot of the data streams are unencrypted just for logistical reasons. That doesn't mean they can't be encrypted, it just means they aren't currently, especially since processing power is increasing dramatically. There's also a difference between being a robot technician and know that a particular drone streams h264 encoded video at a certain frequency and using some factory provided software to unrestrictedly browse data streams on nearby robots and being some guy with a laptop and a ham radio figuring out how to view the stream.
It's all about matching the weapon to the enemy. Drones are good because it allows you to project force into a huge area with minimal cost and risk and you avoid the primary weapons of the enemy. If the enemy becomes more sophisticated and gets the ability to read data streams or combat them in another way they likely start to have more centralized and high value targets and you can engage them with different tools.
Mist
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absorptions: Mystery signal from a helicopter
Did you read about this yet? I wonder how easy that kind of stuff would be to do with drones. And I totally agree with you. If America ever gets into a real shooting war with a real enemy ever again, I have a funny feeling drones won't be very useful, at least, not the ones we currently are fielding.
iannis
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I dunno. At the very least they are high precision guided missiles.
I mean at the absolute least you just pack them with dynamite and kamikazi them into apartment buildings. You don't even have to drive your tank to within 2 miles of the target anymore, and you don't need your battleship parked off the coast to shock and awe the enemy with scuds.
I mean at the absolute least you just pack them with dynamite and kamikazi them into apartment buildings. You don't even have to drive your tank to within 2 miles of the target anymore, and you don't need your battleship parked off the coast to shock and awe the enemy with scuds.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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That's a pretty cool link. It's pretty neat that he was able to isolate a digital signal from its effect on an audio transmission and get GPS coordinates out of it.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there are usually multiple communication streams on a robot, with video being the big one (Or any other high-bandwidth output of a sensor, lidar, time of flight, infrared, whatever). The actual control side of a combat robot should have somewhat sophisticated authentication protocols to prevent someone from hijacking the robot even if they could see the video. A basic research robot someone cooks up with a quick web interface could be hijacked by just using your phone to connect to its web interface, but as you go up in TRL (Technology readiness level - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) you'll start to see more protection.
Aaron
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The thing that I always wonder about with these completely human-less (i.e. neither a driver nor a passenger) vehicles is how you can dick with it. Take that vid for example, the truck stops when a "guy" crosses the street, but what if he's a duchebag/terrorist and just stands there? If there's a driver/passanger they can get out and clobber the idiot, but if there's no-one, then the truck is stop for as long as the idiot wants, unless you have some sort of automated weapon or something to shoot the bastard with if he doesn't get out of the way ASAP.
iannis
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I assume that in a real situation either the machine becomes quickly useless and exposed for being another DoD boondoggle... or there is some sort of electronic signalling at work. Truck only stops if you have the red keycard, bro. Otherwise you get splatted.
Which seems to dovetail in with what mist is talking about. It's a pretty big kink to be worked out.
Which seems to dovetail in with what mist is talking about. It's a pretty big kink to be worked out.
Lejina
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On convoys the truck may drive itself but there's still a human watching the stream and ready to take over if need to. In the case of the asshole in the street the guy monitoring would either take over control or tell the robot to drive over the perceived obstacle.
Tripamang
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I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this. My biggest fear with a robot military is that power is then concentrated into fewer and fewer hands with little standing between them and just deciding that aspects that the civilian population are redundant or that some random country needs some ethnic cleansing. It's hard to convince 20 thousand people to fire on their own people, it's a hell of a lot easier to push a button while robots do it for you.
Tuco
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One question is whether you want a relatively small number of white collar professionals in a safe, controlled and relatively nonstressful setting whose actions are systematically logged and monitored making life or death decisions or if you want a large number of ground forces in dangerous, uncontrolled and extremely stressful settings whose actions are only known to a few making life or death decisions.
Plus when the risk of non-action is the loss of a drone and an opportunity to strike you're more able to err on the non-action side vs having the risk of death for you and your friends if you don't act.
That has been a big of a question. Does shooting people a half a world away make it just a video game to pilots will little thought to consequence.
... and maybe if that is a good thing or not...
fanaskin
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I've seen many pilot interviews from ww2 bomber pilots to present day talk about the act of being in the air disconnects them from what they are doing to the ground, so I would say that effect has been around for a long time, that being said, apparently drone pilots suffer ptsd at the same rate as regular pilots, I suspect you would see a large divergence from ground forces using robots compared to air forces.
Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do - NYTimes.com
Drone Pilots Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do - NYTimes.com
I think the answer depends a bit on the situation. If we're talking about a government in a country using force on it's own population for example I think it would be a lot easier to convince people to do it if they don't have to be there in person and pull the trigger. Furthermore, the next logical step is autonomous drones/robots. Would it be easier to convince an operator to enter a certain set of parameters than to tell someone to go out and shoot people? I think so.
I think relatively cheap, small, disposable, mass produced autonomous weapons will make up the bulk of the military forces in the future. Maybe it will take 20 years or even 50 years before this change occurs, but if you extrapolate the current technical development it seems pretty obvious that humans will be too slow and too squishy for war soon.
Erronius
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Yes and no. If we were to somehow develop a way to power robots w/o having to attend to them constantly, maybe, but that's unlikely. Solar seems unlikely except in the most passive or sedentary application, I don't need to mention nuclear, batteries raises the question of how to recharge them, and the most likely (some sort of combustion) requires refueling and maintenance. Mechanical failures would likely require maintenance by people, and the more complicated and cumbersome the system then the more difficult it will be to recover and then repair those robots. Then you have ammunition concerns...how do you resupply 50,000 robots in the field? If your goal was to keep soldiers out of harms way then forcing soldiers to constantly repair/supply/recover robots in the field brings the entire thing into question.
It's going to either have to be a stupendously gigantic undertaking where almost everything is automated (currently not plausible) or you're going to have to use robots in specific roles (EOD, recon, etc) where they're used only as a tool rather than being used as a wholesale replacement for soldiers across the board. Which is the gist I get from the article, but I imagine even that is probably far too optimistic.
The real rub for me isn't that "people are expensive", though that's true. If that was the only concern they could address that without having to bring robots into the mix. The reality is that in this day and age a draft will almost never happen and they can't get enough people to sign up. Not only that, but when we draw-down between conflicts we then need to recruit unbelievable amounts of people when we do go to war, and as Iraq and Afghanistan showed us, it's impossible to do. When at one point the DOD was forced to make up for the military manpower shortage by hiring so many civilian contractors that there were actuallymore contractors in theater than combat troops, you know that there is a critical issue with recruitment in general and upsizing/downsizing specifically. And bear in mind that if you think that soldiers are expensive, just imagine how much contractors cost.
Costs are somewhat a secondary concern, as bizarre as that sounds. The gov't doesn't have an issue with spending trillions of taxpayer dollars. They just need to address our endemic manpower shortages that we have when we go to war and they're hoping that robots can do what they last did with hiring contractors. Except instead of hiring contractors to move soldiers out of the rear and into frontline roles, they want to try using robots to move soldiers out of front line roles and into the rear. I don't think it's going to work as well as they hope, though.
I'm still laughing that the OP article mentioned wanting to control costs...ludicrous.
It's going to either have to be a stupendously gigantic undertaking where almost everything is automated (currently not plausible) or you're going to have to use robots in specific roles (EOD, recon, etc) where they're used only as a tool rather than being used as a wholesale replacement for soldiers across the board. Which is the gist I get from the article, but I imagine even that is probably far too optimistic.
The real rub for me isn't that "people are expensive", though that's true. If that was the only concern they could address that without having to bring robots into the mix. The reality is that in this day and age a draft will almost never happen and they can't get enough people to sign up. Not only that, but when we draw-down between conflicts we then need to recruit unbelievable amounts of people when we do go to war, and as Iraq and Afghanistan showed us, it's impossible to do. When at one point the DOD was forced to make up for the military manpower shortage by hiring so many civilian contractors that there were actuallymore contractors in theater than combat troops, you know that there is a critical issue with recruitment in general and upsizing/downsizing specifically. And bear in mind that if you think that soldiers are expensive, just imagine how much contractors cost.
Costs are somewhat a secondary concern, as bizarre as that sounds. The gov't doesn't have an issue with spending trillions of taxpayer dollars. They just need to address our endemic manpower shortages that we have when we go to war and they're hoping that robots can do what they last did with hiring contractors. Except instead of hiring contractors to move soldiers out of the rear and into frontline roles, they want to try using robots to move soldiers out of front line roles and into the rear. I don't think it's going to work as well as they hope, though.
I'm still laughing that the OP article mentioned wanting to control costs...ludicrous.
I remember reading a DOD write up about "the future of robots" basically, this was back in the late-90's early-00's, saying part of the reason they aren't very interested in wholly autonomous drone-things is because you need someone to be held accountable when things go wrong. You can't just say "ooops, robot did it" and have people accept that their kids just died to friendly fire from a robot error.
Not saying it still applies, but was interesting.
Not saying it still applies, but was interesting.