4.05.2005

 

Hundreds of robotic airplanes

U.S. Drones Crowd Iraq's Skies to Fight Insurgents

From the article:Also:If the number can go from "a handful" to "700" in 4 years, that would imply that four years from now the number will be in the thousands. And four years after that, the number of these robots will start to approach the number of human soldiers. See Robotic Nation for a timeline.

Comments:
The final reasoning is a bit off. Why would you expect an exponential growth from two data points?

Let's look behind the curtain: it still takes more than one human to operate a UAV. They have tried to solve the "swarm" problem for quite some time but little success so far. So if in 4 years the number of operators tripled, that would be very far from exponential growth.

What I'm saying is that you'll simply have more troops in tele-operation missions than before. This is certainly a bit less dire than doomsday predictions of enslavement to our robotic masters :-D. Actually it is a wonderful development because anything that takes troops out of harms way is good, and anything that ends a war faster because better tools are used is good.

I also have a problem with the view that there is an “us” and “them”, as computer enhanced individuals will probably be appearing before robots have full autonomy.
 
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