From unmanned aircraft to field operatives the importance of robotics in the US army during recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan has increased dramatically.
Now a report from two leading luminaries in the robot warfare field reckons that these machines could easily account for 30% of forces by 2020.
Doug Few and colleague Bill Smart of Washington University do however concede that this force is still in need of the human touch and that fully autonomous machines would likely be the ones without weaponry.
“When the military says ‘robot’ they mean everything from self-driving trucks up to what you would conventionally think of as a robot. You would more accurately call them autonomous systems rather than robots,” said Smart, Professor of computer science and engineering.
Robotics advancements of course raises ethical questions, such as where to place the blame if a robot kills someone, but as technology advances more robots are being sent to the front line first.
“It’s a chain of command thing, you don’t want to give autonomy to a weapons delivery system you want to have a human hit the button,” said Smart. ”
Those Sci-Fi films of your youth are looking more like documentaries by the day.
