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DARPA Drone Distinguishes Soldiers And Civilians

So, DARPA says they have a drone that can tell the difference between combatants (soldiers) and innocent non-combatants (civilians).


(DARPA drone)

The small drone, with its six whirring rotors, swept past the replica of a Middle Eastern village and closed in on a mosque-like structure, its camera scanning for targets.

No humans were remotely piloting the drone, which was nothing more than a machine that could be bought on Amazon. But armed with advanced artificial intelligence software, it had been transformed into a robot that could find and identify the half-dozen men carrying replicas of AK-47s around the village and pretending to be insurgents.

As the drone descended slightly, a purple rectangle flickered on a video feed that was being relayed to engineers monitoring the test. The drone had locked onto a man obscured in the shadows, a display of hunting prowess that offered an eerie preview of how the Pentagon plans to transform warfare...

“There’s so much fear out there about killer robots and Skynet,” the murderous artificial intelligence network of the “Terminator” movies, [Robert O. Work, the deputy defense secretary] said. “That’s not the way we envision it at all.”

Well, I of course have full confidence in DARPA. However, popular cinema has had its say on this subject, and leaves us perhaps in doubt. For example, ED-209 from the 1987 movie Robocop.

Via NYTimes.

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