Swarms of MIlitary Robots Trained by Our Minds

Recently, robots designed at the University of Buffalo are being trained through the use of gamer’s brainwaves. These robots will be a part of a robot swarm that could be useful for a variety of military tasks. The Government believes that these robots could enhance the autonomous ability of air and ground robots used by the military. Instead of using one extremely complex robot to complete tasks, the idea is that a bunch of smaller simpler robots in a large group will be able to be more efficient and complete a larger variety or complex tasks. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or “DARPA” supports the research of these robots at the University of Buffalo, and has given them a $316,000 federal grant to study these brainwaves that will be used to develop the AI for the robot swarms (Linder 2020).

I believe that while this technology is really useful and could be used in a variety of cool ways by the military, there are some potential risks with implementing it. A question and concern that I have about these robots is the question of what happens if one of these robots malfunctions do the rest of them keep going or does the whole swarm fail? If the swarm doesn’t fail then I see no issues with this type of technology besides the obvious concern about privacy with all artificial intelligence. Finally, if the gamer’s information is protected and the drones have some sense of privacy, I think this technology would work very well.

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a30855506/darpa-swarm-robots-video-game/

 

3 thoughts on “Swarms of MIlitary Robots Trained by Our Minds

  1. The idea of drones has been a dream for the past few years with recent enhancements to technology and even the invention of a engine powered wing suit that was recently released via video on the internet, its become evident that we are progressing far faster than we should be allowed. From video games to amazon being the first to deliver packages via drone, this invention has taken the breath of a lot of the public. However, drones can be a blessing but also a curse; Drones could be used by malicious users to perform destruction on something without loss of human life, including us. In the new Spiderman movie, at some point in the plot an evil guy takes control over numerous amounts of drones in order to harm civilians, evil acts like this can be perpetrated by these advancements in technologies but it could also benefit us. An example of drones that could be helpful but also detrimental was from an episode of the famous Netflix original Black Mirror in which all of the bees in the world go extinct. Therefore, humanity has to find a way to spread pollen to flowers and they make mechanical bee drones which are, expectedly, used for good as well as bad. Another example from the article I researched is that drones and AI tend to have a lot of malfunctions and crashes not including those who would be able to hack into the drone and control it for their own good and not including the examples above. (Hockett) So, I believe drones can do many great deeds for us but we need to be careful about how they’re implemented and to whom.

    Source:
    Hockett, M. (2018, December 17). The good and the bad of aerial drones. Retrieved February 22, 2020, from https://www.evaluationengineering.com/test-issues-techniques/technology/article/13018926/the-good-and-the-bad-of-aerial-drones

  2. Drones are an amazing piece of technology. Allows us to send in robots instead of our soldiers. They have been in use by our military for many years now. They have saved countless soldiers lives.

    But they can also be very dangerous. It allows potential terrorists to attack targets without physically being at the location. Personally I believe that the next terrorist attack is going to be carried out by drones.

    A swarm attack of drones is very powerful because it makes it very hard to defend against all the drones. There are very few weapon systems that can defend against a swarm attack.

    So while drones are a great invention, they are also a very powerful weapon.

  3. Robots for military use seems to be the next big thing upcoming. Especially after reading the first article, it is hard to think about it happening another way. Robots will take strategies that gamers use whilst playing, and adapt them to real life situations (Linder).

    However, I began to wonder where else robotics in warfare could go. There have been machines for a while that aid in defense tactics, but now they are being created to attack (Fryer-Biggs). Those on the attack like the ones created at University of Buffalo. This brings the idea to me that perhaps in the future humans wont even be needed for combat, it will all be about who has the better robots. This could help a lot in reducing combat fatalities. However, it is possible that robots like these can cause more destruction than we want them to. Without a doubt, this is the direction our country is moving in, and it might as well start now.

    https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/robots/a30855506/darpa-swarm-robots-video-game/

    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/09/killer-robots-and-new-era-machine-driven-warfare/597130/

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