ATLAS: Killer Robot? No. Virtual Crewman? Yes.
Alarming headlines to the contrary, the US Army isn't building robotic "killing machines." What they really want artificial intelligence to do in combat is much more interesting.
By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
on March 04, 2019 at 5:06 PM
No, the Army isn’t turning tanks into robotic “killing machines,” as some excited headlines put it last week. Instead, as part of the military’s urgent push for artificial intelligence, an Army program called ATLAS is developing an AI that acts like a virtual soldier in the turret, one designed to assist the human crew.
Despite an alarming name, Advanced Targeting & Lethality Automated System, ATLAS is actually meant to help the humans spot threats they might have missed, prioritize potential targets, and even bring the gun to bear — but it will be physically incapable of pulling the trigger itself.
Army photo
Donald Reago
“Envision it as a second set of eyes that’s just really fast,” Army engineer Don Reago told me Friday, “[like] an extra soldier in the tank.”
Reago is director of Night Vision & Electronic Sensors at Fort Belvoir (part of the newly reorganized Combat Capabilities Development Command), and he’s worked for 30 years on what the Army calls Assisted Target Recognition. The service has always avoided the more common term, Automated Target Recognition, he told me, because it deemphasizes the role of humans. Whatever you call it, ATLAS’s target recognition system will use machine learning algorithms, trained on vast databases the Army is going to have to put together, protect against misinformation and keep updated. Silicon Valley is great at analyzing Facebook photos and funny cat GIFs; not so much at telling a T-90 from a Leopard II.
(UPDATE: The first demonstration will be on a 50 mm autocannon, smaller than an M1’s 120 mm main gun but, interestingly, the exact same XM913 gun that the Army wants for its future Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle.)
Once ATLAS is fielded, the AI on any given armored vehicle will compare data from multiple sensors, perhaps even from multiple vehicles, to defeat camouflage and spoofing. Then it will identify potential targets and point them out to the crew. How much detail ATLAS provides the user will depend on how good the algorithms get after being trained. But the AI will leave it to the human to determine hostile intent, which the law of war requires before opening fire in self-defense.
“ATLAS … might be saying ‘this is a human who appears to be carrying a weapon,'” Reago said. “The algorithm isn’t really making the judgment about whether something is hostile or not hostile. It’s simply alerting the soldier, [and] they have to use their training and their understanding to make that final determination.”
Above all, ATLAS will not be a second finger on the trigger. “The soldier would have to depress the palm switch to initiate firing,” said Bob Stephan, who’s worked on tanks for years and is now ATLAS project officer at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. “If that is never pulled down, the firing pin will never get to the weapon…. That’s how we will make sure ATLAS never is allowed to fire autonomously.”
(VIDEO) https://youtu.be/sC2ePKRvo9k
MOAR - SOURCE: https://breakingdefense.com/2019/03/atlas-killer-robot-no-virtual-crewman-yes/
Read the Article, a ton of info there, both pros and cons. Make up your own mind as to what you think about weaponizing with AI.
Good night, night shift.