Will technology ever replace the common soldier?

WarMachine

WarMachine

Active member
I was thinking of what aerial drones like the Predator might evolve into someday given enough investment, entire squadrons of combat aircraft guided by computers and AI. Would this technology ever be applied to other fields like army and naval units. If so, will it result in the replacement of the human soldier with machines in future wars? You know, like the terminator.

I suppose the most logical reason for this potential development would be that it saves lives (the lives of the ones who have robots anyway).
 
When you see how incredibly complex the human body/brain is its hard to imagine how long it will take before technology can replace it.
Maybe in a couple of thousand years.
 
Personally I do think we will see more technical advanced equipment issued on squad level as a start. Video cameras, navigating systems and GPS equipment for monitoring soldiers on the battle field is already present so where we will go from here is only limited by our own imagnination.

It has been done research on equipping drones with weapons however the ethical questions are bigger than the technical ones. By this I mean who to issue the orders for attack? How to seperate friend from enemy, etc. The AI needed is one gigantic technological step ahead.
 
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How to seperate friend from enemy
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I was actually reading Popular Mechanics a couple months ago, and there was an article about some technology to distinguish friendly from foe...
 
rotc boy said:
I was actually reading Popular Mechanics a couple months ago, and there was an article about some technology to distinguish friendly from foe...
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Interesting, I watched a programme on Discovery for a few months ago on drones used in Iraq and Kosovo, the program ended with the question above so hopefully DC follow up with a new program this fall...
 
Eventually? Probably. I doubt it will be in the next few lifetimes, though. Even if the technology were present, there would be some huge ethical issues about giving a machine the "choice" to drop the hammer or not. Automated systems have human backups, and I don't think that will change.

If nothing else, issue will arise (as with cloning) from misconceptions people have gotten from movies.
 
I can't find the article i was reading about AI, but it's a very rapidly advancing field. They're getting better at it and might reach levels of animal reasoning soon, i think it's going to be as advanced as an insect's soon. That may seem underwhelming but then the development grows exponentially from there, it's estimated that scientists can develop a human level of intelligence capability by 2020-2030.

That coupled with increasing advances in robotic articulation could build you a realistic android. The military is always at the forefront of these high tech fields, so who nows what the applications might be. Nobody saw MIRVed ICBMs coming when the nuclear bomb was created.
 
sven hassell said:
When you see how incredibly complex the human body/brain is its hard to imagine how long it will take before technology can replace it.
Maybe in a couple of thousand years.
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I write code for industrial computers. There was one stretch of time I had nothing going on. I started programming the human hand. I stopped writing when I hit 900 rungs of logic and still hadn't touched any type of programming that would consider the sensory aspect of the hand, feeling heat, cold administering the proper pressure to pick up an egg or a 10 pount sledgehammer.

As someone said, the human will not be replaced anytime in the next few lifetimes.
 
Simple answer is no.
No matter how good technology may be, at the end of the day you still need good old infantry to seize and hold ground.
 
Add another "no" to the long growing list.

Tech is great, but you can't rely soley on it. We've already seen what happens when soldiers aren't being taught the old ways of fieldcraft, they get into trouble. Machines break, batteries die, computers crash. You still have to have the ability to do it "the old way."
 
PJ24 said:
Add another "no" to the long growing list.

Tech is great, but you can't rely soley on it. We've already seen what happens when soldiers aren't being taught the old ways of fieldcraft, they get into trouble. Machines break, batteries die, computers crash. You still have to have the ability to do it "the old way."
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When saying an ideal, you're right.
But politicians always asks saving of the war expenditure.
If robot soldier is massed produce for about 1,000,000 dollars for one, battle field would be buried by robots.
Because man is the most expensive weapon.
 
That's if you can get the cost down for one of those machines. I'm just going to assume that it would be very expensive to build and maintain a robotic soldier should they come to light. If people start mass producing the machines like cars like in I Robot, then maybe we will see entire armies of them. I guess it boils down to cost benefit in the end.
 
I'm not completely sure if a robot will replace the common soldier.

I do know that robots are taking on jobs that are deemed hazardous for people such as bomb disposal, UAv for recon, and UGV (Unmanned ground Vehicles)
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/ugv.htm

But to replace the infantry? Possibly, but you still need something/someone to hold the ground to claim it as "ours".

What kind of ethical repercussions would there be if a robot killed people? I'm not sure if we as humans are ready to let a machine to decide if a person is a target ir not, I think that we are to comfortable in having a person pull the trigger not a CPU.
 
Robotics cannot replace the common solider but may be used in combination with them. Robotics used for recon (WICS, FIBUA), real time camera surveilance and so on. Sometimes it is better to send in the machines than humans, as seen in recent conflicts.
 
I serious don't think the robots can completely take over all aspects of human in a war scenerio. They may take over most aspects, but never all.

Your title sounds familiar! Are you thinking of Terminator 2?
 
sandy said:
When saying an ideal, you're right.
But politicians always asks saving of the war expenditure.
If robot soldier is massed produce for about 1,000,000 dollars for one, battle field would be buried by robots.
Because man is the most expensive weapon.
Click to expand...

Yes, but you're not recognizing the complications of AI, motor skills, independant and creative thinking, etc. Wars are no longer fought from the trenches, todays warfare requires leadership, tactical planning and strategic thinking all the way down to the lowliest private. Even in wars like WWI & WWII I think we would have been hard presse to create AI sophisticated enough to effectively fight those wars (if this tech existed back then).

It is expensive to train and maintain human soldiers. Several million dollars have been pumped into our guys (individiually) on training alone. However, machines aren't cheap either. Look at the cost of the predator, maintenence, upkeep, as well as the cost for training controllers (pilots).

I agree on your implied comment though, that if someone told politicians a $1M robot could just as effectively wage war as a human, they'd have millions of them made in 10 years. They generally do not look beyond the bottom line. Then we'd be left picking up the pieces when they fail.

We have some pretty neat stuff out there now, some of it is open source info, some of it isn't. It's sort of a catch 22 for us though. (See my other post).
 
Today's soldier would be completely amazing to WWI combatants. They can see better than most animals on moonless nights, they carry more firepower in their pockets than most machine gun nests, even if you shoot him, he will probably get up and kill you, they don't need artillery, they can call on a small phone and two F15 s drop more destruction than ever known by man, then he sends a small plane to see if you're dead. If you made it out alive, the "plane" circles and concentrates bullets over the area of a football field with a square inch between each bullet. Then, they blend into the battlefield and move toward you silently with only the sound of a large caliber bullet hitting anyone able to raise their head, no shot is heard, just the slug decapitating the guy next to you. Then, just as soon as it started, they leave, not in marching formation, but by an aircraft that lands without an airstrip and leaves within minutes. No sounds are heard except for the dieing moans on a light breeze.

Militaries of the world are, for the most part, on the cutting edge of technology and not likely to slow down anytime soon. I was a young technician working with vacuum tubes, now I can hold one of our microprocessor chips on my fingertip.
 
Well, here's the best way to put it- No. YOu need people to support that hardware.

People
ideas
hardware.

In that order.
 
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