A lot can happen in 10 years, especially with the ever-increasing advances in technology. When you think about what might happen in the military in the next decade, the possibilities seem endless. With so much technology at our hands, will humans eventually become second class to machines? Long have robotic soldiers been prevalent in Hollywood, with movies such as Terminator and I-Robot, but some experts think a surplus of robots might actually be enlisting into the armed forces by 2023. Just how many robots? Well, quite a few.
Scott Hartley, one of the founders of 5D Robotics, recently had this to say at an Army demonstration at Fort Benning in Georgia: …”ten years from now, there will probably be one soldier for every 10 robots. Each soldier could have one or five robots flanking him, looking for enemies, scanning for land mines.”
Robots…The Future Of The Military?
Wow. That would be a ratio of 10 robotic soldiers to every human soldier – that’s quite the difference in numbers!
The demonstration at Fort Benning included military leaders observing different robots using M-240 machine guns to hit targets at a distance of 800 meters. Some of these robots were remotely controlled, but others were not. In the future, some leaders are eventually hoping that robots will become more and more human like on the battlefield.
Hartley praises the technology pointing out the lives that could eventually be saved by sending robots into harms way. Granted, if robots are used in place of humans, that would certainly minimize human casualties of war, but it seems it would also make war less of an extreme option. After all, robots don’t have families; they don’t have children who would lose a Mom or a Dad in the fight for freedom. Robotic soldiers also lose the camaraderie gained by their human counterparts.
If the military was full of robots, the country could just go to war without much of a second thought, because really,besides the cost – who cares about robots? Robots are great for a lot of different purposes, but I’m not so sure they should be fighting our battles and wars for us.
What do you think? Are you all for robots replacing most of the humans in the military?