The U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) has started Project Alpha, a think tank whose goal is to replace human fighters by autonomous robots by 2025. In this article, USJFCOM gives some details about the project.
To refine its goals, it held a workshop at Johns Hopkins University at the end of July to review its study, aptly named "Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human out of the Loop."
The goal of the study, according to Gordon Johnson, the Unmanned Effects Team leader for Project Alpha, was to articulate a vision for the use of robotic forces and promote the formation of a Department of Defense-level office that will coordinate and integrate efforts across the armed services.
"What we’ve found in the area of robotics, is that the Navy has programs, the Air Force has programs, the Army has programs," Johnson said. "But there’s no one at the DoD level who has a clear vision of where we’re going to go with these things."
Johnson added that autonomous robots will be more capable than humans: more lethal, cheaper, faster and with unmatched sensing capabilities. And these fighting robots will probably not look like humans.
"The robots will take on a wide variety of forms, probably none of which will look like humans," explained Dr. Russ Richards, Project Alpha’s director. "Thus, don’t envision androids like those seen in movies. The robots will take on forms that will optimize their use for the roles and missions they will perform. Some will look like vehicles. Some will look like airplanes. Some will look like insects or animals or other objects in an attempt to camouflage or to deceive the adversary. Some will have no physical form -- software intelligent agents or cyberbots."
But will these robots be nicely accepted by the military?
"The greatest hurdle is likely to be overcoming military culture," Richards said. "Just getting present-day decision makers to allow robots to perform some functions that are currently being performed by humans will be difficult."
"It will be difficult to overcome the resistance to replacing human pilots, soldiers, sailors, and Marines with robots. Or, to allow machines to make decisions. The case will have to be made based on the imperatives."
This means there will not be any Terminators in our future.
Source: Ron Schafer, U.S. Joint Forces Command, July 29, 2003
12:24:31 PM
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