The state of the art in robotics and artificial intelligence continues to advance at an accelerating clip, surprising experts and futurists. Increasingly complex and in telligent machines are changing the texture of human life as they are insinuated into more spheres of activity, from manufacturing to law enforcement to stock trading.
Military applications have historically been one of the greatest drivers of innovation. We can trace the history of warfighting and especially its recent history as a long arc of removing the warfighter more and more from harm’s way.
1 The so-called “drones” in America’s arsenal represent the latest in this progression, though, importantly, they still require a human to make the potentially lethal decision to engage a target.