As effective as Israel is at utilizing its human resources in times of conflict, the Israeli army may be on the verge of fielding the first fully robotic fighting force. Israel’s Ministry of Defense recently issued a call for the creation of an “Advance Guard,” a robotic vanguard that will lead the charge in future battles in order to minimize human casualties. The bi-monthly journal IsraelDefense reported that numerous Israeli defense contractors are working hard to meet the challenge. Israel already makes extensive use of robotics for the purpose of surveillance. Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are some of the most sophisticated and effective in the world. But this new project is about creating robots that will actually do the fighting, or at least handle the initial armed push against entrenched enemies. “The basic idea is for robots to function as a strike force, leading the way in the first stage of engagement with the enemy, which usually results in heavy casualties,” explained IsraelDefense. And Israel is not just talking about remote-controlled weapons systems here. The vision of Advance Guard is on par with any number of science fiction-based descriptions of futuristic warfare. One of the chief requirements the Israeli military has given to the firms working on Advance Guard is that the robotic warriors (which will NOT look like the image above) be able to autonomously select and engage targets and to coordinate attacks with one another, without human input.
IBM has unveiled two prototype computer chips that are said to emulate the human brain (Image: SyNAPSE)
In April, the University of Southern California made the headlines when it announced that researchers there had created a functioning synthetic synapse circuit using carbon nanotubes. Well, today IBM unveiled a new class of experimental computer chips that are designed to emulate the human brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition. According to the company, “The technology could yield many orders of magnitude less power consumption and space than used in today’s computers.”
Utilizing advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, the two prototype “neurosynaptic computing chips” are said to recreate the phenomena that takes place between spiking neurons and synapses in biological systems. The idea is that such chips would be used in “cognitive computers,” which would learn through experiences - like the human brain - rather than simply being programmed.
To that end, IBM has joined forces with a number of academic partners, to develop such computers through the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project. According to the company, “The goal of SyNAPSE is to create a system that not only analyzes complex information from multiple sensory modalities at once, but also dynamically rewires itself as it interacts with its environment - all while rivaling the brain’s compact size and low power usage.” Phases 0 through 1 have already been completed, while the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has reportedly awarded the project US$21 million in funding for Phase 2.
The two chips themselves contain no biological components. According to the press release, however, both chips do feature 256 artificial neurons, with one core containing 262,144 programmable synapses, and the other containing 65,536 learning synapses. In lab tests, the chips have so far been used to execute simple applications such as navigation, machine vision, pattern recognition, associative memory and classification.
Ultimately, IBM hopes to produce a chip system featuring ten billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses, that would consume one kilowatt of power and have a volume of less than two liters (0.5 U.S. gallons).
“Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture,” said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research. “Imagine traffic lights that can integrate sights, sounds and smells and flag unsafe intersections before disaster happens or imagine cognitive co-processors that turn servers, laptops, tablets, and phones into machines that can interact better with their environments.”
Partners in Phase 2 of SyNAPSE include Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of California at Merced, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison
In the latest installment of the Butterfly Effect: Predator drones are just the start of unmanned, autonomous warfare technology. But as the tech becomes more democratized and more deadly, what happens when anyone can assemble an army of killing machines?
1. Attack Of The Drones
Last month, NATO’s commanders in Libya went with caps-in-hand to the Pentagon to ask for reconnaissance help in the form of more Predator drones. “It’s getting more difficult to find stuff to blow up,” a senior NATO officer complained to The Los Angeles Times. The Libyan rebels’ envoy in Washington had already made a similar request. “We can’t get rid of [Qaddafi] by throwing eggs at him,” the envoy told the newspaper.
The Pentagon told both camps it would think about it, citing the need for drones in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, where Predator strikes have killed dozens this month alone. So why doesn’t NATO or the rebels do what Cote d’Ivoire’s Air Force, Mexican police, and college student peacekeepers have done—buy, rent, or build drones of their own? The development of deadly hardware and software is leading to a democratization of war tech, which could soon mean that every army—private or national—has battalions of automated soliders at their command.
“Drones are essentially flying—and sometimes armed—computers,” the Brookings Institution noted in a paper published last month. They’re robots who follow the curve of Moore’s Law rather than the Pentagon’s budgets, rapidly evolving in performance since the Predator’s 2002 debut while falling in price to the point where Make magazine recently carried instructions on how to launch your own satellite for $8,000.
“You have high school kids competing in robotics competitions with equipment that 10 years ago would have been considered military-grade,” says Peter W. Singer, author ofWired for War and a senior fellow at Brookings, who predicts robots on the battlefield will be a paradigm-shifting “revolution in military affairs.” First comes the high-tech arms race with China, Israel and all the other nations competing to build their own drones. Then comes the low-cost trickledown into low-tech wars like Libya’s, where tomorrow’s rag-tag militias fight with DIY drones. Finally, if robots are simply computers with wings (and missiles), then expect to see future wars fought by the descendants of flash-trading algorithms, with humans as anxious bystanders.
If the Terminator had the ability to just turn himself into a cruise missile and wipe out Sarah Connor’s city, there’d be no movie. In other words, to make sci-fi stories work, the writers often have to add completely arbitrary and pointless limitations to whatever futuristic technology turns up.
But in the name of plot and drama, they sometimes wind up giving the people of the distant future gear that doesn’t even work as well as ours does now, in the boring old present. For instance …
