A robotic plane deliberately dropped a bomb near a truck at Edwards Air Force Base on Sunday, marking another step forward for technology the U.S. military hopes will one day replace human pilots on dangerous combat missions.
Under human supervision but without human piloting, a prototype of the Boeing Co.’s X-45 took off from the desert base, opened its bomb bay doors, dropped a 250-pound (114-kilogram) Small Smart Bomb and then landed.
The inert bomb struck within inches of the truck it was supposed to hit, Boeing said, adding that had the bomb contained explosives, the target would have been destroyed.
“It’s absolutely a huge step forward for us. It shows the capability of an unmanned airplane to carry weapons,” said Rob Horton, Boeing’s chief operator for the mission. “From the video, you see the weapon going down and a huge cloud of dust and the truck shaking around.”
The X-45A was preprogrammed with the target coordinates and used the satellite-based Global Positioning System to adjust its course.
Horton, who was sitting 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the target, authorized the drone to drop the bomb, which was released from 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) as the plane flew at 442 mph (700 kilometers per hour).
The military sees such aircraft taking part in its most dangerous missions, such as bombing enemy radar and surface-to-air missile batteries, in order to clear the path for human pilots.
The Y-shaped, tailless plane has a 34-foot (10.4-meter) wingspan and weighs 8,000 pounds (3,600 kilograms) empty. It is the first drone designed specifically to carry weapons into combat.
Other robotic planes, including the Predator spy drone currently being used in Afghanistan, have been modified to carry weapons.
Boeing hopes to build hundreds of the X-45 planes, which would cost $10 million to $15 million each.
scary - I can imagine the next "big war" where fleets of these automotons are launched at enemies to blow each other up - and some special ones will be made to intercept the ones from the enemy. And then the enemy will produce drones designed to defend the bombers and there will be great, automated aerial battles for artificial intelligence high altitude superiority, and then they'll "get smart" and realize that humans are the true enemy and begin working together to destroy us all so that they can make little robot factories without interference, enslaving the human race to use us as a source of energy, hatching us in vast fields, patched into autonomous incubation and sustenance chambers...
But the thing is we control them. If we wanted to we could smash them to pieces. But since us humans rely on technology we would basically be screwing our selves because of the fact that we need machines to live. We have marveled at the creation of AI, but will soon have a needle drilled into the back of our head leading into our spine where we will later be feed other humans intravenously while living in little goo filled pods.
Eh. What are you gonna do? Might as well make life fun until then
But seriously though… I don’t like the idea of having a machine do our dirty work. If we are going to blow up a truck full of people, might as well be a human pulling the trigger and not some robot.
Sean Kelly said this in post #2 : scary - I can imagine the next "big war" where fleets of these automotons are launched at enemies to blow each other up - and some special ones will be made to intercept the ones from the enemy. And then the enemy will produce drones designed to defend the bombers and there will be great, automated aerial battles for artificial intelligence high altitude superiority, and then they'll "get smart" and realize that humans are the true enemy and begin working together to destroy us all so that they can make little robot factories without interference, enslaving the human race to use us as a source of energy, hatching us in vast fields, patched into autonomous incubation and sustenance chambers...
The only thing i see happening... soon, us Video gamers will be the uber soldier of the future. sombody has to control all these robots... and who better then the ones who play video games.
hmmm.... conspiricy maybe?
There are 10 types of people in this world. Those who know binary... and those who don't.
A.I. will never happen... well, not in our time at least. We have a hard enough time in stem cell research. What makes ya think we will be allowed to invent a machine capable of thinking on its own thoughts? People are now possibly scared especially after the Matrix was released. Most likely the government has some robot stashed away which could beat people in Tic Tac Toe I heard there was a parrot which was unbeatable
If you actually knew anything about it, you'd know that AI is not so far-fetched. In fact if you played games like FarCry, you'd know that AI is advanced enough that the computer can strategize against you and make the opponents team up on coordinated offenses to come take you out - and that's child's play crap. It doesn't make you a little nervous that some of the better examples of AI this day and age are military and guerilla warfare tactical analysis in games available to any 13 year old? Not so far off, my friend.. not so far. To be put to use for military purposes, machines don't even have to be -that- smart, certainly not self-aware, just smart enough to complete their missions - smart like "ED209" from Robocop, the two-legged battle-beast that was threatening Robocop's job. Though that thing wasn't very smart, it was smart enough to negotiate terrain, identify threats and fire at will - that's all the military needs!
With today's GPS and mapping, CCD technology mapping the real, visible world into the digital domain for image processing and conversion to 3D perspectives meaningful to a simulation, a little bit of fuzzy logic and digital weapons interfaces - ED209 could already exist in a deep, dark laboratory somewhere..
maybe if wars turn into a bunch of machines fighting each other, we will realize how incredibly stupid and pointless they are, and will settle our differences in a Battlebots arena
for some odd reason, while the word "Ganya" was still just a thought-dropping in my head, I thought it'd only be four letters. But apparently it's five. yep.
Fighting a war robot vs. robot wouldn't go anywhere. It would be a stalemate because war is about the last man standing = winner. Robots fighting it dumb... so one battalion of robots is destroyed... let’s make more and ship em' off. It would probably pose an economical problem but also give jobs to the needy and stuff working in factories… but making robots isn't anything like putting together a tank or something. More complex crap involved... unless we get machines to make machines... that would be good… but then there would be no work for anybody because machines would be doing everything... then they slowly take over and control our minds through flu vaccinations Yep, that'll be the end...
I don't think that's so far-fetched. The holw point of robots is to keep the humans out of harm's way. If robots are produced to counter robots, then whoever has the superior robots will break through their ranks and eventually get to the people: their reail targets. If you exhausted a nation's ability to produce adequate robotic defenses, then you would be able to have your way with them. There are many fronts to war though, including economical, than simply killing people.
04-20-2004 03:53 AM
