but I’d guess these fully-autonomous robot helicopters with 300-rpm automatic shotguns are just the first step towards a fleet of 24/7 robot aircraft that actually could prevent an aerial assault on a sensitive target like Pearl Harbor — or, say, the Pentagon.
Gee, what could we call this fleet — I’m thinking something catchy like “SkyNet.”
On a completely unrelated note, the Sarah Connor Chronicles start up in January.
h/t: Survivalblog.
Heh, My brother has a little part in the Sarah Conner Chronicles.
Two of my favorite things, Firearms and UAVs.
They could also be used to discourage folks from improving their marksmanship deep in forests too. Potentially a scary development as well.
Good point, Yatalli, but I don’t think the US MIL is quite ready to get itself involved with surpressing constitutional rights. They *do* fight and serve for their country and founding charter. I rather believe that if they were instructed to participate in operations against their countrymen, there would be a lot of dissent and desertion, unless it was for a *very*, VERY good reason. Having said that, I cannot conceive of any good reasons. Keep ’em in the X ring…
Anthony, you’re quite right and I’m not thinking the military would do any such thing. I DO get nervous when we start arming robots that can be “let loose” to operate COMPLETELY AUTONOMOUSLY — no human controller — as these can. Read the article; it’s discussed a bit past the midway point.
I’ll just say the programming REALLY needs to be debugged on these babies before giving the “run” command.
Roger that David.
There isn’t a low-flying UAV out there that is good enough in the autonomous mode to avoid directed weapons fire….yes, if you bring one down, the controller will know where it went down, but if you do a “shoot and scoot”, you’ve killed the bird and it won’t fulfill it’s mission.
When our dot gov starts a program of spying on us with UAVs, look for many of them to end up as broken parts suitable for recycling.
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