Man vs. Machine

While browsing the web, I found an article about the changing military scene. Whether we like it or not, technology on the battefield is changing drastically. As the Navy's slogan states, they are working to unman the front lines. There are a variety of different Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Military officals are concerned with the lose of the most valuable resource they have; trained men. Usually used for spying, UAVs are small aircrafts that wouldn't even be large enough to hold a person let alone controls. And they do save lives. Because they are drastically lighter and smaller, most military equipment has a very hard time detecting, locking-on, and destroying this small aircrafts. Even president Obama is pushing the idea of futhering this new technology.

But UAVs aren't the newest thing out there in the military world. With every new leap in military technology, there must always be a counter to this new discovery. This new discovery is the perfect counter to the spy planes. What they do is mount a giant laser to a Humvee and use the auto targeting to lock-on and wait until the target is within range to be completely obliterated by the massive laser. Sucessful field tests have been done at long ranges. The range and the size of the target have not be disclosed to the public yet. They may even be working on a laser that can destroy fighter jets as well.

Most of you reading this are probably saying “Wow that’s awesome! Now we can have automated defense and recon!” And yes this is good. Robotics has taken a huge leap this century. The only problem is that people do not know where it will end. Japan has robots that look and act like humans. There is a youtube video of a particular robot that looks like its creator here.

The difference between the robotics in Japan and the robotics here in the United States is we focus more on created robots for our military while they just create robots for personal entertainment. The concern with robots in military is not that they will replace humans. The problem resides in wondering at what point will the military say “We have enough robotics.” Most of us have seen the movie Terminator. The army itself is entirely made out of unstoppable robots. If our government manages to perfect the idea of these robots, they could enslave the world. It could end up something along the lines of what happened in the movie I, Robot. Not the evolution aspect of the robots but the fact that the robots could be used to force people to do stuff and put people into slavery.