September 2015 – TECHNOLOGY – Do a Google image search for ‘armed drone’ and you’ll see General Atomics Reapers outfitted with Hellfire missiles, perhaps soaring over the sandy plains of Iraq, Syria, or somewhere in Africa. In the future, the phrase may come to mean something very different. The next frontier for drone technology – and particularly autonomy – is on and under the seas. Already, the U. S. and other militaries are doing research into ways armed robots could do much of the work that is today performed by manned warships and submarines, especially in difficult environments like the Arctic. But a new white paper from the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, released last month, warns that ever-smarter naval robots could make for very choppy waters in places where the United States, Russia, and other nations have a growing presence and competing interests.
‘Experts have suggested that fully autonomous weapon systems are likely to first appear in the relatively ‘uncluttered’ maritime environment,’ the report says. ‘While a small group of experts are actively considering the legal and ethical issues raised by maritime autonomy, policy-makers have directed little attention to the specific issues and challenges that arise in this context.’ While Elon Musk and others debate the logic of more autonomous aerial drones, the U. S. Navy has long used autonomous weapons on its ships. The need for a sea system that could shoot on its own was evident to military leaders as far back as the 1950s, when advances in electronics and missile propulsion raised the prospect of highly accurate anti-ship weapons that could strike faster than human reflexes could defend.
This post was published at UtopiatheCollapse on September 9, 2015.
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