[Paleopsych] NYT: A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield

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A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16robots.html
February 16, 2005

    By TIM WEINER

    The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far
    different from the army it has.

    "They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces
    Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their
    orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot.
    Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."

    The robot soldier is coming.

    The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in
    the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing
    enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to
    rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion
    project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract
    in American history.

    The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated
    armed forces. The costs of that transformation will help drive the
    Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested
    $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the
    costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to
    rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to $118.6 billion.

    Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see and react
    increasingly like humans. In the beginning, they will be
    remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the
    technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their
    intelligence grows, so will their autonomy.

    The robot soldier has been a dream at the Pentagon for 30 years. And
    some involved in the work say it may take at least 30 more years to
    realize in full. Well before then, they say, the military will have to
    answer tough questions if it intends to trust robots with the
    responsibility of distinguishing friend from foe, combatant from
    bystander.

    Even the strongest advocates of automatons say war will always be a
    human endeavor, with death and disaster. And supporters like Robert
    Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology in Potomac, Md., are
    telling the Pentagon it could take until 2035 to develop a robot that
    looks, thinks and fights like a soldier. The Pentagon's "goal is
    there," he said, "but the path is not totally clear."

    Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move
    like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or
    crickets. With the development of nanotechnology - the science of very
    small structures - they may become swarms of "smart dust." The
    Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence,
    search buildings or blow them up.

    All these are in the works, but not yet in battle. Already, however,
    several hundred robots are digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, scouring
    caves in Afghanistan and serving as armed sentries at weapons depots.

    By April, an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot will be in
    Baghdad, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Though controlled by
    a soldier with a laptop, the robot will be the first thinking machine
    of its kind to take up a front-line infantry position, ready to kill
    enemies.

    "The real world is not Hollywood," said Rodney A. Brooks, director of
    the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T.
    and a co-founder of the iRobot Corporation. "Right now we have the
    first few robots that are actually useful to the military."

    Despite the obstacles, Congress ordered in 2000 that a third of the
    ground vehicles and a third of deep-strike aircraft in the military
    must become robotic within a decade. If that mandate is to be met, the
    United States will spend many billions of dollars on military robots
    by 2010.

    As the first lethal robots head for Iraq, the role of the robot
    soldier as a killing machine has barely been debated. The history of
    warfare suggests that every new technological leap - the longbow, the
    tank, the atomic bomb - outraces the strategy and doctrine to control
    it.

    "The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making
    life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts
    at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have
    been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than
    a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision
    until we are confident they can make it."

    Trusting robots with potentially lethal decision-making may require a
    leap of faith in technology not everyone is ready to make. Bill Joy, a
    co-founder of [1]Sun Microsystems, has worried aloud that 21st-century
    robotics and nanotechnology may become "so powerful that they can
    spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses."

    "As machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make
    more of their decisions for them," Mr. Joy wrote recently in Wired
    magazine. "Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions
    necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human
    beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage,
    the machines will be in effective control."

    Pentagon officials and military contractors say the ultimate ideal of
    unmanned warfare is combat without casualties. Failing that, their
    goal is to give as many difficult, dull or dangerous missions as
    possible to the robots, conserving American minds and protecting
    American bodies in battle.

    "Anyone who's a decision maker doesn't want American lives at risk,"
    Mr. Brooks said. "It's the same question as, Should soldiers be given
    body armor? It's a moral issue. And cost comes in."

    Money, in fact, may matter more than morals. The Pentagon today owes
    its soldiers $653 billion in future retirement benefits that it cannot
    presently pay. Robots, unlike old soldiers, do not fade away. The
    median lifetime cost of a soldier is about $4 million today and
    growing, according to a Pentagon study. Robot soldiers could cost a
    tenth of that or less.

    "It's more than just a dream now," Mr. Johnson said. "Today we have an
    infantry soldier" as the prototype of a military robot, he added. "We
    give him a set of instructions: if you find the enemy, this is what
    you do. We give the infantry soldier enough information to recognize
    the enemy when he's fired upon. He is autonomous, but he has to
    operate under certain controls. It's supervised autonomy. By 2015, we
    think we can do many infantry missions.

    "The American military will have these kinds of robots. It's not a
    question of if, it's a question of when."

    Meanwhile, the demand for armed bomb-disposal robots is growing daily
    among soldiers in Iraq. "This is the first time they've said, 'I want
    a robot,' because they're going to get killed without it," said Bart
    Everett, technical director for robotics at the Space and Naval
    Warfare Systems Center in San Diego.

    Mr. Everett and his colleagues are inventing military robots for
    future battles. The hardest thing of all, robot designers say, is to
    build a soldier that looks and acts human, like the "I, Robot" model
    imagined by Isaac Asimov and featured in the recent movie of the same
    name. Still, Mr. Everett's personal goal is to create "an android-like
    robot that can go out with a solider to do a lot of human-like tasks
    that soldiers are doing now."

    A prototype, about four feet high, with a Cyclops eye and a gun for a
    right arm, stood in a workshop at the center recently. It readied,
    aimed and fired at a Pepsi can, performing the basic tasks of hunting
    and killing. "It's the first robot that I know of that can find
    targets and shoot them," Mr. Everett said.

    His colleague, Jeff Grossman, spoke of the evolving intelligence of
    robot soldiers. "Now, maybe, we're a mammal," he says. "We're trying
    to get to the level of a primate, where we are making sensible
    decisions."

    The hunter-killer at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center is one
    of five broad categories of military robots under development. Another
    scouts buildings, tunnels and caves. A third hauls tons of weapons and
    gear and performs searches and reconnaissance. A fourth is a drone in
    flight; last April, an unmanned aircraft made military history by
    hitting a ground target with a small smart bomb in a test from 35,000
    feet. A fifth, originally designed as a security guard, will soon be
    able to launch drones to conduct surveillance, psychological warfare
    and other missions.

    For all five, the ability to perceive is paramount. "We've seen pretty
    dramatic progress in the area of robot perception," said Charles M.
    Shoemaker, chief of the Army Research Laboratory's robotics program
    office at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. That progress may soon
    allow the Army to eliminate the driver of many military vehicles in
    favor of a robot.

    "There's been almost a universal clamor for the automation of the
    driving task," he said. "We have developed the ability for the robot
    to see the world, to see a road map of the surrounding environment,"
    and to drive from point to point without human intervention. Within 10
    years, he said, convoys of robots should be able to wend their way
    through deep woods or dense cities.

    But the results of a road test for robot vehicles last March were
    vexing: 15 prototypes took off across the Mojave Desert in a 142-mile
    race, competing for a $1 million prize in a Pentagon-sponsored contest
    to see if they could navigate the rough terrain. Four hours later,
    every vehicle had crashed or had failed.

    All this raises questions about how realistic the Army's timetable is
    for the Future Combat Systems, currently in the first stages of
    development. These elaborate networks of weapons, robots, drone
    aircraft and computers are still evolving in fits and starts; a
    typical unit is intended to include, say, 2,245 soldiers and 151
    military robots.

    The technology still runs ahead of robot rules of engagement. "There
    is a lag between technology and doctrine," said Mr. Finkelstein of
    Robotic Technology, who has been in the military robotics field for 28
    years. "If you could invade other countries bloodlessly, would this
    lead to a greater temptation to invade?"

    Colin M. Angle, 37, is the chief executive and another co-founder of
    iRobot, a private company he helped start in his living room 14 years
    ago. Last year, it had sales of more than $70 million, with Roomba, a
    robot vacuum cleaner, one of its leading products. He says the
    calculus of money, morals and military logic will result in battalions
    of robots in combat. "The cost of the soldier in the field is so high,
    both in cash and in a political sense," Mr. Angle said, that "robots
    will be doing wildly dangerous tasks" in battle in the very near
    future.

    Decades ago, Isaac Asimov posited three rules for robots: Do not hurt
    humans; obey humans unless that violates Rule 1; defend yourself
    unless that violates Rules 1 and 2.

    Mr. Angle was asked whether the Asimov rules still apply in the
    dawning age of robot soldiers. "We are a long ways," he said, "from
    creating a robot that knows what that means."