"The future of war belongs to the bots." [and the cyborgs]
October 16, 2015 11:00 AM   Subscribe

In The War of 2050, The Robots Call The Shots

From the comic book to the battlefield: Get ready for the superhuman soldier, both cyborg and mutant, by reading the US Army's report Visualizing the Tactical Ground Battlefield in the Year 2050 [PDF]
The diverse set of workshop participants painted a vivid picture of the battlefield of 2050, one that brought reality more in line with the science fiction and fantasy the public is accustomed to viewing in the cinema and reading about. A time traveler from today would be immediately taken with the “over-crowding” of the battlefield of 2050 populated by all manner of robots, robots that greatly outnumber human fighters, and robot-looking humans
So what about the Future of War, by P.W. Singer? Enhanced soldiers, semi-autonomous ships, dogfighting drones, in space or on top of a very tall mountain.

Inside DARPA's Attempts To Engineer A Futuristic Super Soldier - Woohoo! But as these systems grow more complex, do we have a reason to fear AI? Never-mind the ethical considerations of the supersoldier [PDF], how will new semi- or fully-autonomous drones change the balance of power. Even though predicting things is hard, especially about the future, we can foresee that "More drone strikes are in store as more countries acquire armed drones."

Foreign Policy partial paywall
Don't bother predicting the next war. The current one will never end, blurring the once-familiar dividing lines including the one that's meant many wars are conducted 'over there.'"

P.W. Singer wrote a book, Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, called "the best techno-thriller since Red Storm Rising."

On Robot Soldiers and the Recession leads to the destruction of the last great welfare state.
posted by the man of twists and turns (23 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
It is always refreshing to look forward to future wars. Why not wait a bit and finish those we are already engaged in?
posted by Postroad at 11:09 AM on October 16, 2015


A very fine scenario for the 1% that are able to have their wedding in a venue far from where the drones fly.
posted by sammyo at 11:12 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


...or own their own drones that can effectively shoot down approaching enemy drones.

With this kind of technology, we will soon reach the point where 100% of all human casualties are civilian.
posted by oneswellfoop at 11:18 AM on October 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


I think a little bit more than the welfare state might get destroyed. Once they don't even need warm bodies to throw at a war, the 1% don't really need other people much any more.

Anybody have a link to the equivalent of that first PDF from 35 years ago?
posted by XMLicious at 11:21 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]




The human fodder bubble is in no danger of bursting yet. Not until the machines are cheaper than the bodies. In order to get to that point, they have to move from invention to volume sales. In order to get to that point, they need more wars and a better armed enemy. In order to get there, they need more of the same as it ever was. Which means more human fodder. Trust the market.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:29 AM on October 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


It is always refreshing to look forward to future wars. Why not wait a bit and finish those we are already engaged in?

We don't end wars anymore. We do, however, start new ones.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:32 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Perhaps the trend outlined here is a good thing. In the future, battlefields won't be littered with blood and human bodies, but will instead resemble messy playrooms, scattered and piled with broken toys, shattered metal and plastic.
posted by clockzero at 11:33 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


That's assuming battlefields stay in tidy places away from civilians.
posted by Celsius1414 at 11:36 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


The Warbots series by G. Harry Stine covered a lot of this back in the 80s, aside from a few technological anachronisms, like having VHS tapes still around in the 2050s.

Here's a review of the series:
As I recall, the stories usually tend to be about the unit in the story trying to accomplish missions in the third world. A lot of it is about them trying to deploy their Warbots to deal with overwhelming enemy forces that the bots can only hold off for so long. The Warbots aren’t very nimble (no ninja-stealth-robots here) since they’re mostly small tracked vehicles, and as a result in urban and jungle terrains can really be quite limited by the environment.

In terms of writing, the stories are okay. They’re really pulp adventure novels in a lot of ways, but with a very cool concept behind them that was way ahead of its time. Our hero Captain Curt Carson (square jawed, heroic military commander) leads his team of tough but lovable troopers on a series of missions that has him fighting villainous dictators and romancing princesses across the globe. (Not kidding, the love interest that shows up later in the series is the daughter of the Sultan of Brunei.)
posted by cuscutis at 11:41 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I thought you meant this Future War
posted by glaucon at 11:41 AM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm waiting for the global adoption of Robot Jox as the preferred method for waging wars.
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:44 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks to technology, in the future there will be no such thing as "wars", "battlefields", and "soldiers". Therefore, there will be no such thing as "civilians" or "casualties".

There will, however, be a HUGE increase in industrial accidents during multinational corporate takeover attempts.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:46 AM on October 16, 2015 [8 favorites]


While P.W. Singer is moderately compelling as someone cataloging what's going on, IMO he doesn’t seem to do much in the way of meaningful analysis. Not that giving a picture of the field isn’t useful, but his ability to discuss seems kind of weak.

Also, be warned that if you go see him give a talk he won’t use slides because he doesn’t need them. That’s fine, but instead of a blank background he opts to play an exhausting collection of context-free video snippets from a variety of unnamed sources that show a slew of robots, planes, and other random things that he considers tangentially related to Our Terrifying Future. He’s the only speaker I’ve seen do this, I can’t imagine why it hasn’t caught on.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:48 AM on October 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I rather expect that there will be exactly one major bot on bot war, and the resulting civilian massacre will result in even semi-autonomous weapons of war being filed in the same category as nuclear weapons: a deterrent, not a useful weapon.
posted by Blackanvil at 12:33 PM on October 16, 2015


I rather expect that there will be exactly one major bot on bot war, and the resulting civilian massacre will result in even semi-autonomous weapons of war being filed in the same category as nuclear weapons: a deterrent, not a useful weapon.

Fighter jets are already semi-autonomous, so that line is pretty porous.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:51 PM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


The Crusades, Part One, began late in the eleventh century and were stretched into the fiteenth. There's no reason to believe that Part Two will wrap up any quicker: it's not as though humanity has learned anything in the interval.

But I expect to see further development of EATR -- possibly the addition of fast and reliable DNA sequencing to ensure appropriate food.
posted by fredludd at 1:18 PM on October 16, 2015


Trying to remember a science fiction story where world wars were fought by robots on the moon; it was basically Robot Wars on the moon, with the mutual agreement that the loser would accept the terms proposed by the winner for the peace treaty, with the understanding that this was better than unleashing the bots on Earth. The story itself was set in a bar with guys watching it as if it were the Super Bowl, which it kind of was.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:27 PM on October 16, 2015


America is doing this. We are the major force in the world pushing a technological and lethality arms race in weaponry, selling that weaponry, deploying that weaponry in our own ever increasing number of foreign interventions, adding to the ever-expanding and never-ending war on terror, etc. Sure, other countries start their nasty little wars, but they'd be happy shooting at each with AK-47s and F-16s. When the world is a bleak and desolate hellscape patrolled by killer robots, people can look back at the U.S. military-industrial complex as the major cause.

A lot of these articles were kind of disgusting in their gleeful technospeak too. Like 'the future world will totally suck, therefore the US military should spend yet more money to play more fun war games!'
posted by zipadee at 3:26 PM on October 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


Second Variety has been dropped on the Blue a few times...
posted by j_curiouser at 3:54 PM on October 16, 2015




I feel like I'm disinterested/concerned about robots unless those who create them are for the purpose of eliminating poverty, ending patriarchy/racism/all the isms, and resulting in a more egalitarian society. But that goes for about everything else too. (Crap, does that mean that we have to create them too?)
posted by yueliang at 6:09 PM on October 16, 2015


From the comic book to the battlefield: Get ready for the superhuman soldier, both cyborg and mutant

If they're being deliberately engineered it might be more accurate to call them Inhumans.
posted by homunculus at 7:00 PM on October 16, 2015


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