By Paul Scharre
In contemporary sci-fi—HBO’s “Westworld,” for example—sentient machines take up arms against humanity. In the real world, intelligent—and increasingly autonomous—robots are being created with weapons already in hand. More than 16 countries (not to mention terrorist groups like the Islamic State) already possess armed drones. Militaries around the globe are racing to deploy robots at sea, on the ground and in the air. For now, these machines operate mostly under human control, but that may not be the case for long. This raises a question: What happens when a Predator drone has as much autonomy as a driverless car?
More than 30 nations have defensive, human-supervised autonomous weapons for situations in which the speed of engagement is too fast for people to respond. Used to defend ships and bases against rockets and missiles, these systems are overseen by humans who can intervene if necessary. South Korea has deployed a robotic sentry gun to the demilitarized zone bordering North Korea. Israel has used armed ground robots to patrol its Gaza border. Those weapons aren’t fully autonomous, but the Israeli Harpy is. A loitering munition programmed to search a wide area for enemy radars, the Harpy is able to detonate without asking permission once it acquires a target. Five countries have purchased the weapon; China has reportedly reverse engineered a version of its own. And the Harpy may be only the beginning.
The Harpy is designed to attack radars, not people, and no country has announced plans to build fully autonomous killing machines. But inside government defense labs and private companies, AI technology is racing forward. The following military projects in development around the world that show how autonomy is advancing. None of them are fully autonomous, but they bring us closer to the day when our weapons pick their targets themselves.
Classification: Armed ground robot
The official Russian military doctrine lists NATO as its No. 1 external threat, and the Uran-9 could be deadly to NATO tanks. Although it lacks the firepower or armor to fight a tank head-on, the unmanned Uran-9 could be a successful ambush predator. Firing its 30 mm cannon and antitank guided missiles could expose its position and lead it to be taken out, but the exchange still might be a win if it takes out a Western tank. Russia is also reportedly developing a fully robotic version of its T-14 Armata, which has the firepower to not only ambush but stand toe-to-toe with Western tanks and win.
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Classification: Autonomous unmanned shi
At the ship’s christening in 2016, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work laid out his vision of “anti-submarine-warfare wolf packs” hunting in concert, armed with missiles: “Imagine 50 of these distributed and operating together under the hands of a flotilla commander,” he said. A group of Sea Hunters might be better than a $1.6 billion destroyer at attacking enemy submarines—and at $20 million each, it would certainly be less costly. Although currently weaponless, the Sea Hunter, which can navigate autonomously, is a “fighting ship,” Work said, part of the Navy’s future “human-machine collaborative battle fleet.”
The Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile ILLUSTRATION: ALEXANDER WELLS
Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile
Classification: Self-guided munition
Engagements at sea can occur over hundreds of miles, and in the time it takes a missile to reach its target, the “area of uncertainty” in which the target might be found grows larger and larger. The Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile, capable of autonomously avoiding “pop-up threats” en route to its destination, uses AI, sensors and target recognition to detect all ships in the area of uncertainty and identify the one it was sent to destroy. The missile needs a person to fire it; once airborne, it hunts on its own.
Drones from the Fast Lightweight Autonomy programPHOTO: ALEXANDER WELLS
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s FLA program aims to build small reconnaissance autonomous devices that can navigate cluttered warehouses at speeds up to 45 miles an hour. Quadcopters outfitted with custom sensors, processors, algorithms, high-definition cameras and sonar could assist infantry “grunts” in urban combat, one of the most dangerous roles in the military. Though Darpa has expressed no intention of weaponizing FLA, Stuart Russell, the former director of the Center for Intelligent Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, warns that a fleet of these machines could amount to a “weapon of mass destruction” if armed. Russell envisions small fast-moving antipersonnel drones performing swarm attacks. “If 25% of them reach a target, that is plenty,” he says.
The X-47B ILLUSTRATION: ALEXANDER WELLS
The X-47B
Classification: Experimental drone
The two X-47Bs unveiled in 2011 were the first unmanned aircraft to autonomously take off and land on an aircraft carrier and the first uninhabited aircraft to autonomously refuel in-flight. Although they seemed to presage a future of robot combat aircraft, they carried no weapons, and the Pentagon has expressed no interest in arming them. Instead, the technology paved the way for drones like the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray, a future tanker plane with a potential secondary role in reconnaissance.
Paul Scharre is a former Army Ranger and the author of “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War.”
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