Russkies in Oklahoma!

[seabolt]

if the studies I worked on have any bearing its only a matter of time before intelligent processing is mixed with mobile and adaptive machinery and then you have terminator like machines, they already have robots working on the ground in Iraq and then humans are obsolete, just send in the machines,

Having added my share of gasoline to this conceptual bonfire, I'll now contribute an equal portion of water.

The researchers in the field constantly gloss over this distinction, but the difference between a drone with a human operator on the far end of a telelink and a true autonomous machine is absolutely vast. Those robots on the ground and UAVs in the air in Iraq have "eyes" but they can't "see." Their video feed is just an abstract array of pixels. Sophisticated programming can provide some rudimentary element analysis for their video feed, maybe on par with the ability of a housefly, but it will be ages before a machine can negotiate its environment with the sensory confidence of a drunken fratboy, much less that of a honed and wary warrior.

Early efforts in autonomous warfare tech also will struggle mightily with the context gap, which is the fact that you can't program decision-making into a device as quickly as a human can subvert your work. If you really want to beat Big Blue, you kick over the chessboard and break out a deck of cards and the poker chips. When Big Blue relearns how to be the ultimate poker bot you cash in and set up the backgammon board. *Or* you let Big Blue eat your queen in its opening moves to distract it as you pull its power cord.

By the time that you have a machine with our level of sensory analysis and abstract conceptualization, you no longer have a machine: You have a stainless steel human. The transhumanists make the argument that eventually we'll design our own evolution in this fashion. They might be right. The world certainly won't be an arena full of chrome sociopaths vs hapless meat monkeys, whatever the case.

-- 30 --