Aug 9, 2024
Killer robots have arrived on the battlefield - Washington Examiner
Published by Washington Examiner on Aug 9, 2024
When it comes to the technology allowing robots to kill people without the need for a human to guide them, as George Allen, the late coach of the Washington football team, now the Commanders, said, “The future is now.”
If there were ever any doubts, the lessons from the war in Ukraine have erased them. The real-world battlefield has become an incubator for the cheap, deadly efficient drone technology that’s being compared to the crossbow, gunpowder, and airplanes for the transformative effect it’s having on how wars are fought now and will be in the future.
In Ukraine, small, off-the-shelf commercial quadcopters have been “MacGyvered” into AI-assisted killing machines that can pursue fleeing soldiers, destroy main battle tanks, knock helicopters out of the sky, and set oil refineries ablaze — all flown by a distant operator using a video game controller.
Debris is seen in the aftermath of a Russian missile strike on July 8, 2024, near the Lukianivska metro station in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Anton Shtuka/AP)
Seaborne drones have sunk half of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, revealing a vulnerability that suggests the naval warfare will never be the same.
Drone warfare has been around for decades, but artificial intelligence, computer algorithms that allow machines to think and act like humans, is the real game-changer.
