A proposal would give “armed autonomous systems” the authority to shoot to destroy hostile weapon systems but not suspected combatants.

2006-10-17: Lethal robots

South Korea just unveiled the first generation of autonomous robots armed with lethal weapons. They’ll eventually be deployed to help secure their 250 km border with North Korea, and they come equipped with rubber bullets and machine guns.

2007-04-15: Mr Carr is suddenly tackling a lot meatier subjects than the latest web 2.0 bore

we’ve come to an important juncture in the history of warfare in which military robots will increasingly have the ability to autonomously select and destroy targets without human guidance.

2007-05-08: Soldier-robot love

soldiers who award “purple hearts” to their bomb-defusing robots that get injured; soldiers who describe in details the personality quirks of their ‘bots; soldiers that take their robots on furlough, to give them “rest”.

2007-08-25: Recon Scout

Throw it through a window or over a wall, then remotely maneuver it using the portable operator control unit. You’ll get immediate real-time video that will let you plan and act with confidence. Before you send in your team, send in your Recon Scout.

2008-01-12: iRobot Army Contract. The same company that builds the cuddly roombas also builds combat robots.. When the revolution comes, it might come from hello kitty lookalikes brandishing weapons
2009-04-11: The state of military robots, drones and UAVs, and their consequences.

2011-11-04: Automating assassinations

Here’s how drones are changing warfare:

An Assassination List.
Drones make it easy to rapidly find and kill people. As a result, assassination of threats has become the easy solution to many problems. It has become so popular that the process has become automated through an assassination list. The US President has one, and he can put US citizens on it via a simple, non-judicial, bureaucratic process.

Signature Strikes.
The current practice of the CIA in Pakistan is to kill groups of people that “look” like terrorists or guerrillas. Exactly what a group of people needs to do, wear, or be to trigger the signature of a terrorist/guerrilla group is unknown.

Borders melt.
Nearly every country in the world can be penetrated with drones. In most cases, they don’t know they’ve been penetrated. In others, there’s nothing they can do to prevent it.
there is no single person who has oversight over the whole program, including the president. and you have contractors needing to make quota for target identification… what could possibly go wrong?

2011-12-17: The first manhunt/arrest of a US citizen via a Predator drone

+

The design, prototype implementation, and demonstration of an ethical governor capable of restricting lethal action of an autonomous system in a manner consistent with the Laws of War.

= ?

2012-01-21: More on the kill lists

a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we’re assured are bad and who are sometimes US citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process.

2012-02-17: Once drones are fully autonomous, what are you gonna do with all the type 2 diabetes pilots in nevada? Perhaps you repurpose them as front-line grunts.

“the Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”

2012-03-14: Drone assassination

2012-11-30: UAhelicopters. Maybe this can make the manhattan heli tours affordable?

Autonomous piloting of an Apache helicopter.

2013-05-16: Self-aiming Rifle. Here, have some future shock on this nice day.

This device is sure to provoke controversy, but it doesn’t seem fundamentally novel to me: rather, it’s the compact, portable version of something we’ve seen for years in naval point gunnery systems such as AEGIS and PHALANX. Basically, this is an almost entirely automated gunnery platform: you look through the scope and select a target, and pull the trigger to tell it to fire on its own mark; then it waits for a clean shot and takes it. A first-time shooter can reliably hit targets at a range of 450m, which is no big surprise, since the shooter isn’t actually doing much of the work at all: this is an automated gun system.

Thinking of this in the range of applications: for hunting as a sport, it kind of defeats the purpose of the “sport” aspect. (Especially if you added just a bit more logic to help it identify deer or whatever on its own, and just ping the operator for confirmation before taking a shot) It’s basically an automated killing device. For hunting for survival, it would certainly be effective, although if you’re using a device this fancy then perhaps you have more efficient means at your disposal of getting food.

Its main application, AFAICT, is as a sniper’s weapon, where this could be tremendously powerful. A system like this could likely improve the single-shot accuracy of even an experienced scout/sniper, and combined with an even longer-ranged weapon like a BMG, it could become robotic death at a distance.

What’s perhaps more alarming is that it would turn absolutely any random person into the equivalent of a moderately skilled sniper, and I cannot think of any chain of events that begins with this that doesn’t end really, really, badly.

The other important thing about this is that there are obvious extensions possible with this technology: with just a bit more AI logic to identify candidate targets (and, presumably, check with a human before taking shots), you could turn this into a fully autonomous point defense platform that just sits there and kills any targets of a certain category that it sees. It would be awfully effective at it, too. The delayed-triggering technology could be combined with high-ROF-capable guns to produce a sort of deadlier version of a machine gun: rather than firing rounds off as fast as possible, and losing significant accuracy due to the motion of the gun, it has an eye strapped to the barrel which means that it only fires each round when it’s pointed at a target. A weapon of this sort could be as much deadlier than a machinegun as a machinegun is deadlier than a repeating rifle. Combined with a base that can move itself to improve shooting vantage, you have a killer robot. (Imagine mounting this device on, say, a Boston Dynamics BigDog, or a small UAV) But even without that, it could make infantry motion through surveyable spaces as impractical as massed infantry charges against machine-gun posts, by simply picking off anyone who is visible for even a moment.

The key innovation is that the sort of advanced tracking technology we saw decades ago with the AEGIS is now mountable on a single rifle, rather than on a large weapons system. This allows unprecedented accuracy and versatility of mounting.

As a military weapon, this could reshape the battlefield, and possibly be the start of the end of the use of infantry. This is a weirdly mixed development; if sending individual people to kill people becomes impractical, it means that warfare will focus instead much more on mass weapons such as bombs and chemicals. But infantry is where most of the people involved in a war get killed, so this could have the perverse result (after, perhaps, one or 2 wars in which people learn just why infantry doesn’t work as well) of greatly reducing the human cost of war.

As a civilian device, OTOH, this is completely insane. I’d rather have people walking around with hand grenades. This is alarming enough on the battlefield; having cities full of people with automated sniping platforms is a spectacular disaster waiting to happen.

(As a side note, this thing has WiFi on it. How thoroughly has its system security been vetted? On the list of things that I do not want unauthorized access to, “automated sniper rifle” is pretty close to the top.)

2014-03-26: Flying military vehicles

Advanced Tactics Inc, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.

2015-07-27: Autonomous Weapons Ban

More than 1000 leading AI and robotics researchers and others, including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, just signed and published an open letter from the Future of Life Institute today calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons.

FLI defines “autonomous weapons” as those that select and engage targets without human intervention, such as armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain predefined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions.

The researchers believe that AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is feasible within years, not decades, and that the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

2015-10-16: Battlefield 2050

The diverse set of workshop participants painted a vivid picture of the battlefield of 2050, one that brought reality more in line with the science fiction and fantasy the public is accustomed to viewing in the cinema and reading about. A time traveler from today would be immediately taken with the “over-crowding” of the battlefield of 2050 populated by all manner of robots, robots that greatly outnumber human fighters, and robot-looking humans

2016-01-14: Skeye Pico Drone. It seems fairly certain that the clandestine sector has far smaller drones by now

2016-04-12: Being on a kill list

I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.

2016-09-06: on the likely futile efforts to ban fully autonomous weapons via un talk shops.

Forget about drones, forget about dystopian scifi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.

2017-01-11: Glimpses from our grim meathook future

The test consisted of 103 Perdix drones launched from 3 F/A-18 Super Hornets. The micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing.

2017-02-22: Drone wars have begun

A pair of Islamic State fighters in desert camouflage climbed to the top of a river bluff in northern Iraq to demonstrate an important new weapon: a small drone, with swept wings and a small bomb tucked in its fuselage. The 2 men launched the slender machine and took videos from a second, smaller drone that shadowed its movements. The aircraft glided over the besieged city of Mosul, swooped close to an Iraqi army outpost and dropped its bomb, scattering Iraqi troops with a small blast that left 1 figure sprawled on the ground, apparently dead or wounded.

2017-07-23: Drone Warfare ROI

The Ukrainian SBU now believes that the destruction of an arms depot at Balakliya that did $1b in damage was carried out by a small drone armed with a thermite grenade. That’s an ROI of $500k for every $1 invested

2017-08-17: Dubstep works surprisingly well for killer drones.

2017-09-20: Yes, lasers shooting down drones are now a thing. I’m very amused by all the physics-challenged people in the comments who suggest that you can dodge the lasers.

2018-03-14: This won’t be funny in a few years. You may want to read up on An Ethical Governor for Constraining Lethal Action in an Autonomous System

Speaking at a hastily called White House press conference Friday, a visibly tense and perspiring President Barack Obama confessed that the United States’ fleet of 700 armed drones have been conducting airstrikes entirely on their own for the past several years.

2018-06-24: Future drone swarms

Future war could like a lot like Ender’s Game. This would be billions of tons of hypersonic drones combined with a variety of super-weapons. There will not be the million fold chasm between chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. There could be a smoother range of power using magnetic power storage, kinetic weapons, nanotechnology enhancement to achieve and eventually exceeding nuclear energy and nuclear weapon systems.

2018-12-03: Seeing ballistic missiles

Despite these and other advantages, Scharre does not want the military ever to turn over judgment to computers. To make his case, he offers compelling real-life cases in which human judgment was essential for preventing needless killing, such as his own experiences in Afghanistan. “A young girl of maybe 5 or 6 headed out of the village and up our way, 2 goats in trail. Ostensibly she was just herding goats, but she [was actually] spotting for Taliban fighters.” Scharre’s unit did not shoot. Yes, it would have been legal, but he argues that it would not have been morally right. A robotic sniper following strict algorithms might well have opened fire the second it detected a radio in her hand.

2019-01-10: A DIY shrapnel drone

Video footage captures the moment when an explosive drone, loaded with shrapnel, piloted by Houthi rebels, exploded over a military parade in Yemen. It killed 6 soldiers and injured at least 20 more, including the army’s chief of staff. “Very effective attack. Houthi drone tactics are fascinating. Commonly used to blind Saudi/Coalition radars to cover missile launches (tactic pioneered by Hezbollah vs Israel), sometimes as impromptu cruise missile itself.”

2019-05-09: Automating air to air combat

DARPA is automating air-to-air combat, enabling reaction times at machine speeds and freeing pilots to concentrate on the larger air battle and directing an air wing of drones. Dogfighting will still be rare in the future but it is part of AI and automation taking over all high-end fighting. New human fighter pilots learn to dogfight because it represents a crucible where pilot performance and trust can be refined. To accelerate the transformation of pilots from aircraft operators to mission battle commanders — who can entrust dynamic air combat tasks to unmanned, semi-autonomous airborne assets from the cockpit — the AI must first prove it can handle the basics.

2020-08-21: Stupid fighter jocks are history

In a 5 to 0 sweep, an AI ‘pilot’ developed by Heron Systems beat one of the Air Force’s top F-16 fighter pilots in DARPA’s simulated aerial dogfight contest today.

2021-03-29: More on superhuman drone swarms

Behind this, there is the military argument. If AI-controlled weapons can defeat those operated by humans, then whoever has the AIs will win and failing to deploy them means accepting defeat.

Debate still swirls around this topic. The emergence of drone swarms and other types of weapon that cannot be defeated by humans alone will crystalize it. However, it is not clear whether the legal argument will be able to keep up with technology, given how long it has already been going on. At this rate, large-scale AI-powered swarm weapons may be used in action before the debate is concluded. The big question is which nations will have them first.

2022-11-26: While not autonomous, this is the most lethal & effective yet.

LANIUS is a highly maneuverable and versatile drone-based loitering munition, designed for short-range operation in the urban environment. The system can autonomously scout and map buildings and points of interest for possible threats, detecting, classifying and syncing to Elbit Systems’ Legion-X solutions. LANIUS can carry lethal or non-lethal payloads, capable of performing a broad spectrum of mission profiles for special forces, military, law enforcement, and HLS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4McPHBQ9pNw

2023-02-23: DARPA program for massive drone swarms

the goal of AMASS is to develop the capability to launch and command 1000s, perhaps 10000s, of autonomous drones, working together to destroy a multitude of an enemy’s defenses, including air defense, indirect and precision weapons, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms. The AMASS program is expected to include swarms of multi-domain autonomous vehicles, including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs).

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