AI 1.05 — Robotics, AI and Military Implications:
Improving Tech, Adapting to Changes and Overcoming AI Winters
Our present ideas about Artificial Intelligence date back to some millennia ago. The idea of a mechanized human being captured the minds of the Greeks, and they were fascinated by the idea of things which could act on its own will. This fascination remained analog for the longest time, but it paved way for means of understanding the building blocks of AI. The power of algorithms and ways to learn and use them were discussed as early as the time of Aristotle and Porphyry. It got more sophisticated and reached complexities as much as fighting wars in the 20th century, from Germans encoding war messages with Enigma, to Turing cracking them with decoders at enemy lines. These were complex systems which were powered by complex algorithms.
It is a fact that the Greeks thought about automata, but we can perhaps conclude that up until a point in the 1900s, all the robotic beings highly imitated human traits. A functioning human being with a created mind. A mind with a proper manual to it. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that the term “Robot” would be used in Czech satire, Čapek. R.U.R. It was a satire that robots were manufactured biological beings that performed all unpleasant manual labor. The word Robot originally comes from Czech word robota ‘corvée’, or in Slovak ‘work’ or ‘labor’.
The 40s would see the coining of the term “robotics” and also writing of the popular three laws of Robotics laid out by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. In 1945 Vannevar Bush published, ‘As We May Think’, an essay that investigated the potential of electronic data processing. He predicted the rise of computers, digital word processors, voice recognition and machine translation.
Up until this point, we would only see robots being used mainly in literary works or movies. The biggest shift in using Robotics in modern times would be by General Motors when they would go on to use robots in assembly line in ’61. The Unimation robots were programmed to extract hot metal parts from a casting machine, and then welded these parts on auto bodies. They were programmable but didn’t necessarily have a programming language, but these robots automated and performed the hard and arduous task that could’ve been lethal for workers.
The usage of robots would only be furthered into military implications in the Vietnam war in the late 60s and early 70s where they used automated command technology and sensor networks in unarmed areas. 1962 saw the investment to Ryan aeronautical firm, a whopping $1.1 million to make an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. They came out with theutilization of Firefly, an unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, and marked the beginning of such efforts in war.
The end of the Vietnam war would also see what were called “Fire-and-forget weapons” once launched no further attention or action was required from the operator. The end of the war would also see the development of precision munitions and smart weapons. Despite such efforts made, the robotics of the efforts were not as robust and veteran robotics scientist, Robert Finkelstein, had pointed out saying that it took decades for UAVs to recover from Vietnam misperceptions.
Humanoid Robot efforts made in parallel:
The Japanese, in the late ’60s, started working on the development of humanoid robots. Waseda University initiated the WABOT project in 1967, and in 1972 completed the WABOT-1, the world’s first full-scale humanoid intelligent robot.
Its limb control system allowed it to walk with the lower limbs, and to grip and transport objects with hands, using tactile sensors. Its vision system allowed it to measure distances and directions to objects using external receptors, artificial eyes and ears. And its conversation system allowed it to communicate with a person in Japanese, with an artificial mouth. This made it the first android in modern times standards.
The ’70s and ’80s saw increasing efforts from multiple research labs and universities from all around the world to building the more perfect version of humanoid robots. Freddy and Freddy II were robots built at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, which were capable of assembling wooden blocks in a period of several hours. Another such effort was made by a German based company KUKA to build the world’s first industrial robot, FAMULUS, which had six electromechanically that was driven axes.
Leachim was one such robot, made in Bronx of New York City, which had the ability to synthesize human speech and was designed to be schoolteacher.
The first variant or the perhaps the genesis of the self-driving car was made by Turing award winner and founder of The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Raj Reddy. The navigation robot created was called ‘The Stanford Cart’ and it successfully crossed a room full of chairs in 1979. It relied primarily on stereo vision and was able to navigate and determine distances with the tech.
Artificial Intelligence in Military Operations: A Global Perspective:
After the Vietnam war, the usage of Robotics in the military has only been steadily increasing. The Chernobyl incident was one such dire need where UAVs were used where humans couldn’t enter the radioactive fields, not just at that time but also some thirty-three years later years later, a mission was carried out at the nuclear power plant to determine whether there was nuclear waste still left in reactor 5 or not. The used Elios 2 Drone technology helped in nuclear plant inspections, to improve safety and significantly reduce the maintenance time as the pilots were able to fly the drone in and collect visuals for checking on the nuclear debris.
The 90’s and 2000’s wouldn’t just see increase in two main powers fighting with Robots, we would also notice that such technological brilliance was picked up by many more states worldwide. Other notable robotic Military UAV efforts went into Iraqi war by the west. When U.S. forces went into Iraq, the original invasion had no robotic systems on the ground. By the end of 2004, there were 150 robots on the ground in Iraq; a year later there were 2,400; by the end of 2008, there were about 12,000 robots of nearly two dozen varieties operating on the ground in Iraq. As one retired Army officer put it, the “Army of the Grand Robotic” is taking shape. The usage of UAVs has only been a natural incline with more impactful and AI heavy artillery taking the forefront in conflict and war scenarios, a resource taken up by not just the leaders in weaponing and combat but also by other smaller militaries around the world.
Second wave of AI and the slow surge of commercial AI:
Despite having only a handful of moments the second wave was not entirely a miss, as it had a key contribution of acting as a Springboard to elevate the footing that was given to the third wave. We would see the beginnings of the US based Robotics firm, Boston Dynamics in ’92. A company which would go on to create robots which would competently mimic the mechanics of the things which would naturally come to humans like walking and running to so much more.
In 1996, it was nice to see a change of attitude from Kasparov to go from, ‘As intelligent as an alarm clock’ in the early 90s to basically ‘We can adapt’. Should’ve taken quite some courage to let go and accept that Machines got better than humans in chess when he lost huge to Deep Blue after an unbeaten streak against mere mortals. Apple’s Newton didn’t hit off the ground very well but perhaps we did start to gear up for what could be.
At the end of second wave, a couple of college grads from Stanford would start to work on a search engine which would pave way into the future. They would bring together a lot of communities together founding the world’s most popular internet company. The later phases of AI would be enriched and strengthened by the think tanks, open-source contributors and groups taking up challenges to further the usage of AI. The buzz is after all created by the buzzers, those who participate and those who just show up to these events. But as we move forward, it won’t be just stakeholders and governments, but also the ordinary man, who would be convinced that the exciting times are a coming. The power of the internet and the cloud would all come together to bring the researchers and interested parties as one.
References and further reading:
1. Gartner Predictions: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-predicts-the-future-of-ai-technologies
2. Military and AI: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-militaries-are-using-artificial-intelligence-on-and-off-the-battlefield
3. Rule of AI and wars: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/military-robots-and-the-laws-of-war/
4. Ethical AI in military action: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3139-1.html
5. AI in action: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-militaries-are-using-artificial-intelligence-on-and-off-the-battlefield
6. AI in Indian Defence: https://www.ddpmod.gov.in/sites/default/files/ai.pdf
