Real Autonomous Terminator’s By 2020
Real Hunter Killer (left) looks eerily similar to the fictional T2 Hunter Killer (right)
Ever wondered how close the world is to having real Terminator’s roaming the battlefield? Ask the Pentagon and they’ll tell you about ten years.
The Defense Department is working on autonomous, self-governing armed robots designed to find and destroy targets completely on their own -- and the plan is to have them deployed by 2020.
From McClatchy Newspapers:
As of now, about 5,000 lethal and nonlethal robots are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Besides targeting Taliban and al Qaida leaders, they perform surveillance, disarm roadside bombs, ferry supplies and carry out other military tasks. So far, none of these machines is autonomous; all are under human control.
The Pentagon’s plans for its Future Combat System envision increasing levels of independence for its robots.
“The trend is clear: Warfare will continue and autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in its conduct,” Ronald Arkin, a robotics expert at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, wrote in a study commissioned by the Army.
A few days ago scientists announced synthetic blood will be available within 3 years, and synthetic skin has already succeeded in live trials. In fact, Robotics designer David Hanson builds robots with synthetic flesh faces, the most well known being a copy of Albert Einstein:
By the time the third movie in McG’s planned Terminator Trilogy is released, the real thing might already be on the battlefield -- or in the streets.
From Calgary Herald:
Peter Singer, who has authored books on the military, warned that while using robots for battle saves lives of military personnel, the move has the potential to exacerbate warfare by having heartless machines do the dirty work.
“We are at a point of revolution in war, like the invention of the atomic bomb,” Singer said.
“What does it mean to go to war with US soldiers whose hardware is made in China and whose software is made in India?”
Singer predicts that US military units will be half machine, half human by 2015.
There is some good news -- there are plenty of John Connor’s listed in the world’s phonebooks…
