Five Giant Leaps for Robotkind: Expanding the Possible in Autonomous Weapons
Andrew Hill and Gregg Thompson
December 28, 2016
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History teems with brutal ironies. The printed program for the November 29, 1941 Army-Navy football game included a photo of the USS Arizona with the caption, “It is significant that despite the claims of air enthusiasts no battleship has yet been sunk by bombs.” Just eight days before the Pearl Harbor attack, the destruction of several battleships by aircraft seemed impossible.
The biologist Stephen Jay Gould observed, “Impossible is usually defined by our theories, not given by nature.” The dividing line between the possible and the impossible is often contingent on our incomplete understanding of the nature of the world and the provisional assumptions we use to explain and to predict. Rarely do these assumptions align perfectly with reality. In the development of combat capabilities, we may behave as though the boundary that divides the possible from the impossible exists in nature, waiting for us to discover it and push our military power up to its very limits. But there is no such line anywhere but in our heads. The boundary is the product of our ideas about the realm of current possibilities and our limited understanding of uncountable future possibilities.
Standing at the beginning of the robotics revolution in warfare, we too frequently speak of impossibilities. In a recent speech, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said:
http://warontherocks.com/2016/12/five-giant-leaps-for-robotkind-expanding-the-possible-in-autonomous-weapons/
