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There are three fundamental problems I see here: 1) Why put humans on warships at all? Algorithms are probably better at it. Computers would obviously do the
by amalcon 15y ago
There are three fundamental problems I see here:
1) Why put humans on warships at all? Algorithms are probably better at it. Computers would obviously do the heavy lifting anyway (calculating burn times). An algorithm knows no fear, shows no mercy, and does not flee or surrender unless programmed to do so. The only thing left is target selection, and it doesn't seem worth bringing a human along just for that.
2) If you don't need to put humans on warships, then you quickly realize you don't need a warship at all. Just send a bunch of missiles from wherever the warship would have launched. It's harder to take them all out at once with a "mine" or something. You also get to build more missiles if you don't need to build the warship. Sure, you might attach a collective nuclear rocket "booster" to many missiles to build that initial velocity. There's no need for that rocket to be anything more than an engine temporarily attached to the missiles. It's also not really required to begin with.
3) If you're sending lots of missiles, there's no reason for them to be any larger than the smallest size permitted by design and manufacturing practicalities. For something that amounts to a liquid-fueled rocket, that smallest size is preposterously small. A liquid-fueled rocket can be fit into an object the size of a soda can with current technology. This makes the notion of point defense completely laughable: divert ten thousand missiles out of one hundred thousand, and you've reduced the incoming energy by 10%.
- icefox 15y agoOn the same idea of not having humans I have been wondering when when we will see a war type video game where you play drones be it land air or sea rather than soldiers on the ground or flying a plane. The cost of sending humans is so high just around our little planet that I can't see how anyone would want to inject humans into any space attacking where the costs as mentioned in the article are so much higher.
- modeless 15y agoRTS games have the player directing an army of autonomous AI-controlled drones. In a game like Supreme Commander they don't even pretend to be people.
- zeteo 15y ago> Why put humans on warships at all? The whole idea of the article is to explore what's possible with current technology, and general-purpose AI is not part of that. Guided missiles are routinely defeated by counter-measures even when the flight only takes minutes.
- amalcon 15y agoHow would having humans a few light-seconds away from the missiles be able to help with that?
- zeteo 15y agoEh? My point was that humans on board can improvise (remember Apollo 13) and carry out their objectives even in the presence of a forewarned and intelligent opponent.
- srl 15y agoThe real reason, of course, is that war is just so much cooler when people are dying. Sources: G. Carlin. Honestly, though, I fully expect AI to advance sufficiently in the next 20 years that a 10s delay is sufficiently small, and the AI can handle anything likely to occur in under 20s on its own.
- zeteo 15y ago>I fully expect AI to advance sufficiently in the next 20 years Yes, people have been expecting AI to become human-like within 20 years for the past 6 decades. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#Dartmouth_Conference_1956:_the_birth_of_AI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellige... ("Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years")
- ricree 15y agoDid you read the rest of his post? He didn't predict general intelligence within the next 20 years. Rather, he predicted that the special purpose weapons AI would be sufficient to handle the sort of latencies that would happen in some hypothetical space combat. Perhaps I'm reading your posts wrong, but it seems a fairly conservative prediction to me.
- evo_9 15y agoI think they main reason the author 'puts' humans in ships is because of when the article was written - 2005. Simply put, drones are a new idea that hadn't really crossed many peoples minds until they started popping up in the military. Beyond that I think it's a pretty well reasoned piece.