If you’re old enough and were into science fiction movies then you might remember a few like 2010:The Year We Make Contact, War Games, I Robot or The Matrix. If the movies didn’t give it away our title might have, what they all have in common is Artificial Intelligence.
If you don’t already know what it is, my simplest definition would be a human made object that is capable of making decisions on its own. Toasters popping the toast up after a certain amount of time wouldn’t count that’s not a decision. Something as simple as an electronic mouse searching its way through a maze would though. When we hear Artificial Intelligence though we think it needs to be the strongest definition of the term, as in an object created that closely resembles a human’s way of thinking in certain situations. Could be anything from pushing someone out of the way of a falling object to what to watch on tv etc…
The reality is though we’re already producing a number of Artificially Intelligent devices and no I’m not speaking about your IPhone. There’s one in particular that’s been plastered all over the news as of late, if you haven’t guessed what I’m talking about, it’s a drone. The drone I’m speaking of is the aircraft that the military uses to fly surveillance and other types of missions. It technically still has a human operator behind the controls but just like commercial air-line pilots they’re not really needed, as the computer takes care of most of the decisions. With the military they’re there just as a failsafe, pretty much the same case with air-liners as the pilots actually land the plane 25{463c70c279fb908728b910a090d44fbe4ae7aabcd875de9c1a518a8c8e2be8bd} of the time and that’s just to give them practice.
The military’s use of drones doesn’t stop their either, if I use the term loosely to refer to any robotic type device without a human onboard operator then we can move into land and sea as well as air. Airplanes and submarines or boats are much easier than their land counter parts as land can have many types of terrains from smooth to rough. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has all kinds of different types of events when it comes to these types of vehicles as well, this includes completely autonomous cars that drive completely on their own, or even search and rescue type vehicles that will make its way through rubble to find survivors and notify rescuers. The list of uses is more or less left to the imagination.
What’s not left to the imagination might already be out there. The United States Military already has a number of them and plans to increase their role in the near future. By the year 2015 its goal is to have 1/3 of its military autonomized in an effort to save American lives.