Ouze wrote:
I agree entirely. I'd be pretty surprised if we don't have fully autonomous, no human in the loop, combat drones within a decade. The X-47B is already executing more complex actions in a technical sense right now, today. The only thing in the way is political pressure, the technology is there and has been for years.
Yeah, thats the crux of it entirely, I am acutally impressed so far at how much we have held ourselves back in this regard.
the jurrassic park meme springs to mind "we spend so much time on if we could, that we never consider if we should." and I am suprised we are heeding that advice in this regard.
Its 100% possible for us to have autonomous combat units right freaking now... aerial drones, flying robots the size of large bugs are already here, can fit in buildings, and relay targets for larger drones with weapon mounts, autonomous sentry guns and tracked guns are 100% buildable right now. We already have them doing all the
FOF target selection, with just a double check by humans done but it isnt required the vast majority of the time already. It is already on par with human error in target selection, if not better.
For some reason, people assume it has to be a human like robot, with legs and arms, before they consider it autonomous, and yes, those anthropomorphic robots are a decade away or so, but they are not needed to replace 90%+ of combat roles with robots.