Doug Few and Bill Smart of Washington University have produced a new report that states by 2020, robots could well account for 30 per cent of the US army. They have under estimated the probable outcome by a long way!
Bill Smart says the term robot' means:
"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."
The pair also go on to say that while robot use will increase, fully autonomous systems would not use weapons: "It's a chain of command thing. You don't want to give autonomy to a weapons delivery system," said Smart
"You want to have a human hit the button," says Smart. "You don't want the robot to make the wrong decision. You want to have a human to make all of the important decisions."
This study does not factor in the notion of software ai agents where each one is a subject matter expert. If this happens the number of bots will out number the number of solders by 2012.
The picture shows an existing robotic dog that could be connected to the military cloud and used to converse with people through links with ai agents covering any subject. The technology is readily available today – it simply needs the military to be more open minded about AI scenarios that can be delivered fast.
