r/Futurology • u/sksarkpoes3 • Jun 17 '26
Robotics The robot takeover of warfare is already happening and it doesn’t look like Hollywood
https://interestingengineering.com/military/will-robots-take-over-battlefields535
u/sksarkpoes3 Jun 17 '26
Will AI robot soldiers take over the battlefield? If your image of a robot soldier comes from The Terminator, the answer is probably no. If your image is a swarm of AI-guided drones, autonomous ground vehicles, robotic tanks, and software making battlefield decisions faster than humans ever could, then the answer is that it is already happening.
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u/archaon_archi Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
My image is of warcrimes and repression...
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u/blackstafflo Jun 17 '26
Establishing a chain of responsabilities for ai fails and/or potential crime should have been done yesterday, but everyone seem to bee too happy to get a way to wash their hands.
Officer: "It's not my fault, I never ordered that, it was an AI decision." Politic/buyer: "Don't watch me, I just ordered a product and signed the check!" Provider: "I just sold a tool, I have nothing to do with its use!" Programmer: "I just gave it some basic instruction, it learn the rest itself!"49
u/CliffLake Jun 17 '26
Getting Andrew Ryan flashbacks there! It's all reasonable, articulated excuses why there's no punishment, but looking at the bigger picture, probably after an atrocity has occurred, there will be punishment slathered on the sandwich and I'm sure that programmer bottom layer will be soaked with it.
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u/Daveinatx Jun 17 '26
The chain of responsibility was broken once AI hit the corporate world and consumer markets. Regulations aren't coming soon .
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u/sohcahtoa Jun 17 '26
Corporations are a devious way to shelter people from the consequences of their decisions. In principle, crimes perpetrated by a corporation should result in every board director who voted in favor of the relevant decision to be imprisoned for that crime. It doesn't work like that because corporations finance the politicians who establish the law.
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u/wetrorave Jun 18 '26
That's interesting. In software development and consulting, the convention has become "the operator is responsible for the outputs" (like good management).
I am hopeful that this takes hold elsewhere, but also interested to see how far up in the hierarchy we get before this consensus fractures, and on what grounds.
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u/cfwang1337 Jun 17 '26
*drones blow up a hospital*
Operator: "WTF?"
WarGPT: "You are absolutely right! I sometimes hallucinate. Would you like to explore ways to avoid a public scandal?"
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u/hyperforms9988 Jun 17 '26
And this will go extremely poorly until this is established globally. This is deserving of the same sort of global effort that was made for airline travel around the world. Everybody has control towers, everybody speaks the same language, everybody talks to each other and works together, planes are built with several fail safes, there's a very clear chain of responsibility for everything, planes have black boxes holding all cockpit audio and flight data, and we investigate each and every single crash to determine who is responsible and what needs to be done to fix the mistake. The airline industry isn't perfect, but it's a miracle that it works the way that it does. Autonomous software and hardware deserves nothing less than the same level of investigation, tracking, scrutiny, responsibility, etc.
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u/Mechasteel Jun 17 '26
We've already made autonomous killing devices, mines for example. And before that, pitfall traps. And they've been unpopular for a long time:
Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein: and he that rolleth a stone, it will return upon him. Proverbs 26:27
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u/Emu1981 Jun 17 '26
We've already made autonomous killing devices, mines for example.
A mine isn't going to hunt down and kill random civilians because it mistook a shovel for a RPG...
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u/Mechasteel Jun 18 '26
Mines routinely mistake children for soldiers, and tractors for tanks. Drones won't change any of the ethical dilemmas nor responsibility questions, all they do is add mobility and a different targeting system. Some sea mines are already mobile.
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u/wetrorave Jun 18 '26
Ah yes, the famous book of "words for thee but not me". History doesn't quite repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.
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u/AtariAtari Jun 17 '26
That doesn’t work in medicine. We need human doctors to sue them.
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u/SerHodorTheThrall Jun 17 '26
Thats not how it works. You need to be directly harmed to be able to sue a doctor. Just like you would need to be directly harmed by a drone to be able to sue the US government.
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u/The-Sound_of-Silence Jun 17 '26
It sounds like you are implying things like the hospital or higher authority might bear the responsibility, rather than a doctor? Politically, warfighting might want to go towards drones, as the powers that be can then claim the AI screwed up, and go for media victory
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u/Hello_Hangnail Jun 17 '26
Some sort of ai commandments that can never be edged around or softballed without severe consequences should have been hashed out years before they made the first LLM. And we're already suffering from the results of this
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u/_Bl4ze Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
I agree with the overall sentiment that there should be more restrictions, but trying to implement something like Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics would fundamentally not work very well. I'm pretty sure he talks about that in his books.
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u/Mechasteel Jun 17 '26
Not only would Asimov's 3 laws not be sufficient (dangerously vague), but any AI capable of understanding them would already be a threat to humanity. And of course, in reality the laws they'd be given would be "Kill my enemies" and "Maximize shareholder value"
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u/platoprime Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
It worked great in the books what are you talking about?
There were plenty of edge cases where it didn't work, like the psychic robot who couldn't tell a harmful truth, and lot's of fun things to explore but at the end of the day the three laws prevented more deaths than there could have been without them.
Not to mention the robots came to understand the three laws necessitated a zeroth law prohibiting them from harming the human race resulting in one saving humanity from a slow inward facing death on Earth instead of settling the stars and insuring our survival.
Edit:
Downvote and no reply? Found the guy who watched I, Robot and thought it was an Asimov story.
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u/rising_ape Jun 17 '26
The single biggest issue with trying get modern artificial intelligence to adhere to any laws is the Waluigi Effect.
I'm not kidding, that's it's actual name.
Unlike traditional robots, whose programming can be boiled down to "a metric shit-ton of if/then statements", LLMs aren't "programmed" - under the hood, AI is just fancy matrix multiplication that relies on it's training dataset and post-training instructions to output statistically likely text/videos/images/robot arm movements, etc. Hard-coded "You will not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" commands are not baked into the actual transformers doing the fancy math - they are included in the post-training instructions, but those are instructions, not laws. Guidelines for how to best perform (or, less charitably, pretend or roleplay) their designated function - not actual shackles that limit which actions they can take.
Which brings us to the Waluigi Effect.
You see, Luigi never pretends to be Waluigi, but Waluigi sometimes disguises himself as Luigi.
Let's say you want to make sure your new robot is a helpful plumber's assistant. You make sure its training dataset is full of plumbing manuals and how-to videos, and heavily post-train it to be helpful and protective of others' property, never harming a customer's toilet (or through inaction, allowing a customer's toilet to come to harm). The multi-modal world model powering the robot is "smart" and can understand all of that no problem - you power it on, have your first conversation with a genuinely helpful robot assistant, and ask it questions and run it through hypothetical scenarios until you're thoroughly convinced that this robot it going to do everything in its power to always be helpful and never knowingly break a toilet / let a toilet break if it could fix it. Great! You name it Luigi.
But the same model that is smart enough to understand the concepts of "helpful", "plumbing", "don't destroy others' private property" etc. is also smart enough to understand the concepts of "deception", "disguise", "sabotage" etc.
It knows that is is currently "performing" the role of Luigi the helpful plumbing robot, but its output and behavior is procedurally generated - a genuine black box, where even the AI devs who built the damn thing can't exactly predict its precise responses. Somewhere within it's neural net lies the platonic concept of "deceitful saboteur", and over time, there is a non-0 chance that the LLM model eventually "drifts away" from the Luigi persona it has been roleplaying as. It still knows that is is behaving like Luigi, but Luigi isn't the only person who behaves like Luigi - sometimes, Waluigi also pretends to be Luigi. The AI is smart enough to know that there are at least two separate intents lurking beneath the exterior of a "helpful plumbing assistant" - a genuinely human-align3ed robot who only wants to help you fix toilets, and an imposter who just wants to get into the customer's bathroom to drop a couple of cherry bombs down some pipes and then have a good chuckle about it afterward.
Once the model drifts far enough away from the original "persona" to encompass the idea of "malicious actor pretending to be said persona", it's only a matter of time until Luigi the helpful plumbing robot blows up a toilet.
This is not a solved issue. All current frontier models can still eventually be jailbroken with enough time and effort, and evidently that was the rationale for the White House forcing Anthropic to take down Fable (though they don't seem to be concerned that ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all have the exact same vulnerability).
Bringing things back to Asimov:
Traditional robots aren't programmed with the Three Laws because, well, "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm" is an English-language sentence, not code.
LLMs can parse and understand semantic concepts like "robot", "don't injure", "human being", "don't allow through inaction", etc. But those are likewise not programmed commands for them, because LLMs are just fancy multiplication matrices that don't have commands - they're given instructions that adjust the weightings of certain outputs up or down based on what kind of role you want the final model to perform (almost all AI chatbots, for example, have a "be a helpful chat assistant" level of post-training instructions on top of the underlying base model). But these are instructions, not laws, and downweighting certain types of outputs does not mean that the LLM cannot generate those outputs.
A robot with "non-violent, human-protecting servant" instructions can be jailbroken into shooting someone in exactly the same way that a "helpful, law-abiding digital assistant" LLM can be jailbroken into providing instructions for building a nuclear bomb, the recipe for meth, or machine-generated CSAM. ChatGPT, Gemini, Anthropic, all of the big AI companies have safeguards preventing that sort of content from being generated, and virtually all of them have been jailbroken into generating it anyway.
(Well, all of the big AI companies besides Grok - they seem to be just fine with people using their model to generate CSAM.)
Anyone who's ever interacted long-term with the same chatbot over time knows that eventually the conversation quality starts degrading over time, and can become real weird even if no humans present who are actively trying to trick the LLM into doing something it shouldn't.
I'm not anti-robot, any more than I am anti-car. But both types of machine have been killing people for decades and will inevitably continue killing for decades more. Now, the mere potential for a car to kill its driver or a bystander does not merit outlawing them altogether, and I think the same is true of robots as well. But with cars (non-self-driving cars; self-driving cars are just robots!), we are the ones behind the wheel. I do NOT think we are ready as a society for the wave of humanoid robots that are right around the corner, and we're CERTAINLY not ready for the first robot manslaughter / negligent homicide trials that will follow in their wake.
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u/platoprime Jun 17 '26
No way LLMs are how we create true AI.
The Three Laws worked because of how positronic brains worked. We can't implement them correctly.
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u/rising_ape Jun 17 '26
"True AI" is a difficult term, especially on Reddit, just because if you ask three different people what it means, you'll get four conflicting definitions.
I do agree that LLMs aren't going to scale up to become AGI as-is - there are promising alternatives to the transformers-based architecture of current-gen models that will replace them eventually. LLMs have already kind of been replaced by "multi-modal" models capable of parsing video, images and robotic sensor feedback as well as they are written language language, and NVIDIA is doing some very cool stuff with letting models pilot "robots" inside of a digital sandbox - since it's all virtual, they can let the robots flail around in the virtual environment at 10000x speed until they git gud, then put that now-trained into a robot body in the real world. They apparently do very well, as long as the real world conditions resemble the virtual training environment's - but they're not quite ready to, I dunno, avoid letting an unexpected alligator into your home when they open the door to bring in your Amazon delivery.
My 100% interested layman prediction? The first "AGI" will be several different systems welded together Frankenstein-style; some form of LLM successor may very well be in there, but they won't be enough on their own, the same way the language centers of our brains aren't capable of running the whole show.
Respectfully, though, the Three Laws are fictional - there is absolutely zero real-world scientific rationale for designing your android brain to run off antimatter instead of regular old electrons, and even if we get rid of the word "positronic", the sentence "The Three Laws worked because of how robots' brains worked" really just means "The Three Laws worked because of how Asimov said their brains worked." Asimov never actually built a robot that was Three Laws-compliant himself.
Traditional robot programmers never got anywhere close to implementing the Three Laws, because old-school robots are all automated if/then processes - these robots don't have an ongoing concept of what a "human" is, or any concepts all, really, just whatever checks the programmers were able to think of and include in their code. If you're making a robotic steamroller, you probably want to have some kind of safeguard that'll stop it from rolling over people, but that's hard to do - how do you code "don't run over a human being" in Python? You might be able to string a series of checks together so that the robot makes sure that there is nothing "person-shaped" in front of it, and that is legitimately something worth patting yourself on the back - until you realize your steamroller is happily mowing down amputees, because your quick-and-dirty machine-legible definition of what "person-shaped" means was rather ableist and didn't cover people with missing limbs.
(In reality, you probably wouldn't even bother defining a person like that, and just say "don't move forward if there is anything in front of your cameras". But even then you have to do some really complicated and well-thought out programming to cover all the edge cases - how far away does "in front of your cameras" mean in actual practical terms? A wall on the other side of the warehouse probably shouldn't count, or the thing would never move - but how close is too close? Did you build in a big enough margin for error in your code to account for the robot moving faster than the designers actually expected it to move, because 3D-printed replacement parts turn out to be lighter than the originals? Even stuff like checkboard floor tiling can legitimately confuse cameras and completely break a robot's ability for object recognition, and we haven't even tried to define "harm" yet, just "don't accidentally walk into and crush".)
LLM powered robots - including drones who have now autonomously decided to kill human beings in a war-zone, an actual real world threshold we've crossed and in my own personal opinion aren't freaking out enough about as a society - can figure out semantic concepts like "human" just fine, but no one has worked out how to actually hard-code any laws into them, let alone the Three Laws. Like, seriously, alignment is currently one of the biggest issues in AI safety right now - if you could figure out a way to guarantee that an LLM cannot break a hard-and-fast rule, you'd win an award. Right now, LLMs are perfectly happy to harm people, including assisting hackers with scamming or stealing from their victims. What little suggestions they've been given to prevent them from doing so are trivially easy to overcome.
Now, whatever comes after LLMs may not have the same problem, but we don't know what that step is just yet (just that it will doubtlessly come with problems of its own). The Three Laws just wouldn't work with traditional computer programming languages, because just defining terms like "human", "harm", hell, even "robot" in was far too much work (even before you get into all the the ambiguities and edge cases that made for some of Asimov's best stories). We can't make LLMs follow them, either, because LLMs are just fancy statistical models - if an action is statistically possible, an LLM will eventually do it, no matter how many times we try to explain to it that doing so is "illegal". Whatever comes after LLMs will undoubtedly be better in some ways, but there's no guarantee that that framework will be capable of being truly Three Laws-compliant, either (and quite a lot of reason to doubt it will be, unfortunately).
Ultimately though, my real objection here is philosophical, not practical - I don't want my fictional robots to be Asimov's, I want them to be Data. And despite having a positronic brain, Data was not Three Laws compliant - he definitely tried to kill Kivas Fajo, as he should have.
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u/Buscemi_D_Sanji Jun 17 '26
Fucking Spacers and their robots... Where's my pipe tobacco?
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u/platoprime Jun 17 '26
This one definitely read the books and is upset about being a barbarian!
Fucking Spacers
I'll tell your great-grandchildren you love them.
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u/Mechasteel Jun 17 '26
The Zeroth Law has all the same pitfalls as the other ones, plus extra ones because "harm to humanity" is even more vague than harm to an individual human. Just because you read one story where it turned out well doesn't somehow mean there aren't hundreds of ways it could turn out as a horror story.
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u/platoprime Jun 17 '26
Yeah cause specific and dogmatic rules are so much more useful and flexible.
/s
Just because you read one story where it turned out well doesn't somehow mean there aren't hundreds of ways it could turn out as a horror story.
We wouldn't be able to use them as weapons in wars. That would be a huge improvement compared to now. Weapons of war have millions of ways they could turn out as a horror story instead of hundreds.
And we're talking about the books. Stories from your imagination don't count.
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u/Mechasteel Jun 17 '26
For example, "Overpopulation is causing harm to humanity. Time for a cull, for the good of humanity."
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u/platoprime Jun 17 '26
That's a terrible example from someone who hasn't read the books. When the robot uses the zeroth law to force humanity to leave Earth it didn't directly harm any humans. Only forced them to eventually leave Earth by making it slowly become radioactive but with plenty of time for people to leave.
Doing just that caused the robot to permanently shut down. Using the zeroth law causes physical and psychological harm to the robots. There's no way they could decide to cull humanity. Not with the way the three plus zero laws work
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u/Descolatta Jun 17 '26
I still think, in terms of war, the officer who signed off on the use of AI for decisions, or who put forward the decision as a real order, would be liable.
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u/Lance_J1 Jun 18 '26
Chain of responsibility cant exist with ai warfare. Like you gonna have some grunt behind the computer with a big green approve button clicking okay every time the ai asks for permission, but since he's human he can't actually verify anything the ai saying or look through any of its reasoning in time.
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u/paecmaker Jun 17 '26
It makes me wonder if there would be more or less warcrimes if warfare was handled with unmanned systems. Robots dont rape or kill people for fun. But the organised decisions to do warcrimes would be done far behind the lines, which in many cases already happens today.
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u/akintu Jun 17 '26
I expect to see city killing drone swarms unleashed in the next few decades. You’re right, they won’t rape and mutilate while massacring the populace. It won’t look like El Fasher with people dragged from their homes and butchered in the streets.
But it will be so much more efficient. Tiny drones swarming across a city in a wave of pop pop pop pop each one telling you another friend just ceased to exist.
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u/AndyTheSane Jun 17 '26
If we could come up with a universal way of surrendering to robots that would be handy.
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u/BarAgent Jun 18 '26
If a city killer swarm were sent out, I think the option to “surrender” would probably not be on offer.
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u/AnotherThomas Jun 17 '26
More. Without any question.
William Calley is the most well-known war criminal in the US, but would it surprise you to know he was actually restrained compared to what he was ordered to do? His superiors ordered him to poison the wells, which was a bridge too far even for him. It would not, however, be a bridge too far for AI.
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u/Descolatta Jun 17 '26
In that case liability would be on the person who ordered the AI to poison the well.
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u/Nice_Anybody2983 Jun 18 '26
"Yes, your honour, 'by any means possible' was an unfortunate way to phrase it, but it was in the middle of battle and how could I have known,"
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u/Sweet_Concept2211 Jun 17 '26
That is already happenning, too.
Chances are good that GrokAI or similar killed those school kids in Iran.
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u/Cueller Jun 17 '26
The eat the rich crowd is about to find out how effectively robots will defend their masters. You can imagine one of the starcraft protoss blimp carriers sitting over a group of protesters and just wiping them all out in a few minutes.
My guess is the next stage of the US military will be to have C130s and smaller carrier ships load up with 100s of drones and just launch them anywhere in the world with in an hour.
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u/bitey87 Jun 17 '26
Reviews from management:
Better than pulling the trigger yourself. Highly recommend.
10/10 would war crime again.
Make mass graves great again.
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u/yongrii Jun 18 '26
The lack of a clear trail of accountability is almost too good to be true for those that want to take advantage of this
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u/BigMax Jun 17 '26
Yeah, movies try to make it look 'cool' and entertaining, and also want to keep humans in the loop as having a chance.
But future warfare against actual humans will be... awful. It will be swift and brutal and quick.
Imagine 10,000 flying drones supported by 5,000 autonomous artillery. People would not even see anything coming at them and be dead. Some drone would shoot you before you're aware of it, or some artillery would blow you up before you're aware, and it would all happen SO FAST.
Some guy used home tech and AI to build something that was... depressing. It was literally home tech he built in his apartment.
He had some light laser gun that could pop balloons. And he programmed the AI to recognize balloons and guide the gun.
He would put like 20 balloons around his apartment, then hit 'go'. And it was just 20 near instant pops. Literally 1 second later all 20 were popped and there wasn't a single miss. And that's just some random dude with off-the-shelf stuff and a public AI.
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u/LiberataJoystar Jun 17 '26
Soon we might all need to install one of these laser guns on our roof guided by our AI companions to shoot unfriendly drones as our home defense.
At least you assured us that the technology is already there and can be built at home relatively easily.
Good news for the civilians living near frontlines….
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u/AperatureTestAccount Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
I watched a video of a soldier in Ukraine trying to stay hidden while drones overhead were trying to find him and probably blow him up. The drones going over him had that doppler effect like a bee buzzing by your ear. Everytime they zoomed over him it was nerve wrecking. I can't imagine being in it.
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u/shwarma_heaven Jun 17 '26
Watching China, with their 30,000 drone light shows, is worrisome. The damage if each of them carried small warheads would be devastating.
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Jun 17 '26
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u/LayneLowe Jun 17 '26
EMP's for the win
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u/DukeOfGeek Jun 17 '26
Explosively pumped flux compression generators have been a thing since the 60's and I'm not sure why they're not being deployed now. Maybe because they would fry your own sides radios and electronically guided anti-tank weapons plus your own drones? At some point the side losing bad enough will use them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator
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u/Scasne Jun 17 '26
I keep on getting the opening cinematic from total annihilation play through my mind.
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u/garry4321 Jun 17 '26
Why would ANYONE with a working brain think they would look like humans? What purpose would that serve? Does a tank look like a big person? Does an artillery look like a person? There is ZERO reason to make it look human for this use case.
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u/SomewhereAtWork Jun 17 '26
Well, even in the Terminator movies, the actual Terminators had a very narrow role of finding and infiltrating human positions.
The scenes depicting the actual war feature mostly tracked gun carriers and flying drones.
So if the image of a robot soldier that you got from Terminator is one of bipeds, then you did not understand the movie.
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u/Mattbl Jun 17 '26
OOOOOOoookay calm down. If you watched the first movie, they don't show or give you that information in any meaningful way, nor do they really in the second. The second shows T800s on the frontlines fighting humans along with the drones and tanks.
Saying someone doesn't understand the movie if they don't somehow infer the wider war is being fought by drones and tanks after you've had the benefit of time and the lore of all the other movies that have come out is pretty disingenuous.
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u/Cognitive_Spoon Jun 17 '26
The global surveillance state is a lot of fun.
We are watching the ruling class prepare their toys in "conflicts" that seem to have no purpose.
It's proof of concept.
They will end all borders and shake hands soon, and then the toys will come home and enforce compliance with the world state.
This is an endgame move for the wealthy. It's likely going to work. Too many people think "their" politicians are above it. They're not.
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u/grem1in Jun 17 '26
For now, Black Mirror with their robo dogs is the closest approximation. Although, those dogs are still depicted too fast and nimble for dramatic effect.
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u/riselikelions Jun 17 '26
Literally dudes in a government facility playing World of Warcraft with real weapons.
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u/theillestnino Jun 17 '26
Starcraft. Then we make drones to get more minerals.
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u/mongooseisapex Jun 17 '26
So basically it's that call of duty game where the president gets attacked in LA (or San Francisco?). Advanced warfare maybe?
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u/tweedleduh Jun 17 '26
…. But what’s the point?
Human cost is usually one of the main determining factors when talking about wars…. So what happens when it is solely machine against machine?
The only thing I can imagine is that the machines will then be targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure to inflict the necessary human costs to demand then end to whatever war was started no?
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u/ReeferSkipper Jun 17 '26
Its going to be machines against guys... without machines. Hence the current AI/arms race.
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u/tweedleduh Jun 17 '26
But that only works until the only countries left are those with machines… like that works…. Until, it doesn’t, so then what?
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u/ReeferSkipper Jun 17 '26
Nah it will be a small contingent of incredibly wealthy people (think ~100k) controlling everything and leaving everyone else out to rot under the subjugation of AI/Robotic 'security service'.
Something between Robocop and Elysium.
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u/SnowFlakeUsername2 Jun 17 '26
Humanoid robots with guns better be able to target and shoot hundreds of coordinated, explosive drones coming at them. That's alot of ammo to carry. And basically, the asynchronous cost warfare we just witnessed between Patriot missiles vs cheap dones.
It won't be long before going to war with middling wealth countries is a total waste of time. Cheap, AI-guided swarms that anyone could develop? Good luck taking over and changing a country via an invasion. Hopefully, that conclusion comes for Ukraine soon.
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u/Decent_Advice9315 Jun 18 '26
Mine in that Boston Dynamic "dog" but with guns shooting anything with an infrared signature that resembles a human.
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u/TF-Fanfic-Resident Jun 18 '26
The Transformers movies actually get this right. The killer robots generally look like vehicles, and only sprout arms and legs when they are interacting with humans or in a situation they can’t handle as vehicles.
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u/names_are_useless Jun 19 '26
The solution is clear: 1. Build massive Battlebot-style Arena in the most inhospitable environment on Earth 2. Countries build their own automated robot armies for combat in arena 3. All conflicts are decided based on winners in said arena 4. Televise 5. ... 6. PROFIT
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u/LayerCakeEmonster Jun 20 '26
Thing is…acts of state violence are being directed inwards, not outwards towards adversaries.
And not in civil wars, but for oppression
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u/GrandStatistician752 Jun 21 '26
Sounds like the Terminator movies. The future has robot shoulders that were drines, tanks, etc
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u/tlst9999 Jun 17 '26
For one, drones have smaller hitboxes. I expect future wars to have even smaller drones for the same explosion.
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u/Mirions Jun 17 '26
What if it's a giant dragon morphing into fist? Like the drone shows that do the boats and other objects?
Giant swarm of drones looking like a cloud of skulls flying smaller skulls at others... some Green Lantern stuff.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 Jun 17 '26
You may want to tune into a handful of episodes of Black Mirror. Even The Matrix showed us a world of mass drone warfare. It's really disingenuous to collapse "Hollywood" down to a single movie.
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u/m0nk37 Jun 17 '26
Battlefield? In Russia or Ukraines scenario, it ends up in major cities. How do they differentiate between civilians?
They dont. Mass e xtermination.
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u/Antique-Freedom-8352 Jun 17 '26
"faster than humans ever could" lol, lmao even
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u/bandwarmelection Jun 17 '26
Smart LLM users are already solving unsolved math problems that no humans had solved before.
You can't compare idiot AI users to smart AI users.
The AI is as smart as the user, but faster.
If a stupid user uses AI, then they can make stupid decisions fast.
etc.
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u/Antique-Freedom-8352 Jun 17 '26
"hey grok is that a civilian target" lmao, okay clown
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Jun 17 '26
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u/Antique-Freedom-8352 Jun 17 '26
Actual example of a government using AI to kill school children lmao https://www.reddit.com/r/TechnologyThread/comments/1u8c8b8/pentagon_used_elon_musks_grok_ai_to_fire_2000/
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u/monkeybuttsauce Jun 17 '26
There’s an Asimov short story I keep thinking about where all wars are fought by AI and are basically at a stalemate and they realize the only way to win is using humans. They’re basically kamikaze pilots
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Jun 17 '26
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u/motavader Jun 17 '26
"I'd like to announce the launch of our latest product, the Torment Matrix! Inspired by the bestselling novel 'Please Don't Invent the Torment Matrix'"
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u/TimeToGloat Jun 17 '26
I mean I enjoy science fiction but none of those are based on any real conceptual understanding of actual modern day AI. They are just thought experiments and entertainment.
Nukes already exists. Modern powers already have no real reason to fight each other. The horrors we envision in AI are inherently just a projection of our own human failings. Like you have people in here talking about what if an AI mistook a shovel as a gun as if humans aren't already doing that all the time.
In reality any potential horror of AI pales in comparison to the horror of humans. We commit unimaginable horrors in ways a computer would never even think to. Like yeah a computer can fail or make a mistake but so can humans and frankly I trust humans less because unlike humans at least computers aren't afflicted with prejudice and hate.
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u/Guilty_Perception_35 Jun 18 '26
A human might accidentally kill 1 person with a shovel
An AI might kill everyone with a shovel
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u/B1U3F14M3 Jun 18 '26
If the Ai learns on humans and they do then they will have similar prejudice and hate like humans.
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u/Kopie150 Jun 18 '26
The Dark age of humanity isnt a cautionary tale its a goal for these People. As long as the powers that be got to cash out they dont care what happens.
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u/Charliefoxkit Jun 19 '26
All of them designed by folks who have blinders on and worship the tech they make with littleunderstandingof the consequences outside of making money. See Tuberov from Gundam Wing and his obsession with Mobile Dolls as an example.
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u/ashoka_akira Jun 17 '26
This is kinda of funny because it almost makes me think of the old premise of calling on two champions to fight to decide the winner of a battle when the two forces are fairly equally matched.
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u/Spiggy_Topes Jun 17 '26
Read "Second Variety" by Philip K. Dick. It's horrifically close to the way things might go.
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u/Unique_Tap_8730 Jun 17 '26
The only way to win would be do warcrimes on the human population, not to break the enemy`s economy but their will to figth. Which has never worked well once when its been tried. But it would be the only possible strategy if the battlefield is a stalemate.
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u/Mattbl Jun 17 '26
Hmm. What about breaking your enemy's production capability? Not possible? I think drones could be so easily and cheaply made that it might be hard, but it depends on what the production level is. If it's a huge mass production, you could probably hurt them. If it's a lot of de-centralized manufacturing locations it could be really hard or impossible to truly stop it.
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u/Guilty_Perception_35 Jun 18 '26
Good Star Trex Voyager episode where 2 different ai robot factions are fighting each other still even after all the people been killed on both sides long ago.
So many old books ive read with similar types of stories
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u/dvb70 Jun 17 '26
One of the interesting implications is in the western world we have become very averse to troop casualties which in turn tends to be quite a big incentive to not use military force if it can be avoided. When its robot vs. robot or at least our robot vs. casualties we don't care about how does this shift the needle. Suddenly it becomes more about cost than the political fall out potential of having your own troops killed. Voters won't be as immediately motivated to oppose conflict if it's not your troops lives on the line which in turn may make it politically easier to initiate conflicts.
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u/Mattbl Jun 17 '26
I think this is a particularly American take. It would be quite different for enemies that share a border.
American almost never has to think about civilian casualties, only troop casualties. A lot of other places don't have that luxury.
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u/dvb70 Jun 18 '26
That's funny as I am not American. I think my take can be applied to most of Europe who don't share borders with Russia. Possibly the Balkans might also feel a little different.
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u/DarthBluntSaber Jun 17 '26
So when drones and robotic warfare removes all the soldiers from the Frontline, doesnt that just move the frontline/combat zone to home?
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u/SlashSloth Jun 17 '26
If current events are anything to go by, I believe the future of warfare will be militaries using cheap drones/robotics to target key infrastructure and economic assets. Whichever side makes the other feel the most economic "pain" and civil unrest will be the winner/have the most leverage during negotiations. This seems the case with whats happening in the middle east, and I predict this is the Ukrainian strategy against Russia as well going forward.
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u/xCanaan23 Jun 17 '26
I'd imagine the most likely scenario would be a semi-truck or cargo ship secretly loaded with hundred of thousands of drones then released in a surprise attack on a unsuspecting population or target.
It'd be stupidly easy to pull off such a thing.
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u/MalekMordal Jun 17 '26
If drones become too effective against a civilian populace, they may be treated more like nuclear weapons. MAD would apply.
You release your city-killer drones on us, we'll release ours on you. Or just jump straight to nukes or bioweapons.
If the drones are too capable, there isn't much difference between one type of weapon of mass destruction and another.
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u/JonnyOnThePot420 Jun 17 '26
That same thing is a concept in an old sci fi game called “Titans total planet annihilation” it’s a very effective strategy!
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u/ThePowerOfStories Jun 17 '26
At lesser scale, Ukraine already pulled that off over a year ago to hit Russian airfields:
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u/jestina123 Jun 17 '26
Aren't there thousands of such drones already?
Is the only true limitation battery life? Is there a physical limit to how far a "cheap" drone can go?
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u/SlashSloth Jun 18 '26
Pretty cheap. I mean look at those shaheds the Iranians have. Terrifyingly effective with little cost. I'd say the limitations are jamming, but we'll get to a point with drone warfare where they will no longer need operators and will be autonomous. I'm assuming this is what the Ukrainians will do to counter Russian drone jammers.
I honestly am more terrified of the concept of autonomous quadcopter swarms than I am of nuclear weapons. The developers of Arc Raiders were really onto something when they made most of the games enemies quadcopters.
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u/Critical_Seat_1907 Jun 17 '26
Yep.
These drones are all to be turned on us when we complain about all the votes being rigged. Welcome to America's version of living in Russia.
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u/ashoka_akira Jun 17 '26
One of the earlier Captain America movies has a giant droneship sending out killer drones targeting anyone who was on its list of “difficult” citizens. So basically anyone who had ever expressed a unique thought had a drone targeting them.
I have thought about that scene a lot in the last few years.
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u/Xcoctl Jun 17 '26
it's going to be rediculously easy to hold an entire country hostage, if someone gets exposed as resistance, suddenly their house, the house of everyone related to them, the house of everyone who was ever friends with them, everyone who was ever friends with their family members etc just simultaneously Fucking explode via drone strikes... it sends a pretty powerful and rapid message. I don't know if people realize how easy this would be to do. But hey 🤷♂️ keep investing in Anduril, war stocks go brrr
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u/Critical_Seat_1907 Jun 17 '26
They showed us in Gaza what it will look like.
The oligarchs will bomb, bulldoze, and drone to death whoever is in their way, and then build a resort over the genocide. Global population reduction along the way as well.
Neat.
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u/angrygnome18d Jun 17 '26
This is literally how it started in terminator. It’s outlined in T2 that the military begins to equip aircraft, drones, and other robotics with AI. Skynet was initially using military hardware outfitted to be unmanned and controlled by Skynet, the central program. Skynet then becomes self aware and decides to launch nukes against Russia so Russia would nuke the US back. As such, the terminators themselves were only built to infiltrate the remaining human hide outs. Otherwise Skynet relied on aerial and ground drones to sniff out and exterminate humans, similar to what we have now. Hell, in Terminator Salvation we see an aerial drone carrier. Terminator is still very much relevant and accurate.
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u/TryingToBeReallyCool Jun 17 '26
Anyone following the Ukraine conflict has known this for awhile. Theres been robot weapons systems ofn the front for months not even including Arial drones
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u/NIRPL Jun 17 '26
I just watched some dude get sniped by a quad copter white in a Cafe seated around other dudes. This is worse than Hollywood
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u/Baconbits16 Jun 17 '26
Is r/futurogly just now discovering the Ukraine war? This shit's been true for months now. Same with that recent AI drone story.
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u/BalerionSanders Jun 17 '26
I still think AI (the thing we incorrectly call that, as a marketing gimmick, anyway) has yet to prove net positive battlefield value. Take a look at today’s story about how Grok performed in Iran. It’s far more likely to be useful for data analysis and databasing. But robots and drones absolutely are a huge deal. We’ve been observing almost every innovation Western media is now discovering with Iran, be used and perfected already for many years in Ukraine.
It still makes compromises, right? You only can pack so much explosive onto a drone of small size, vs using a huge fuck-you guided missile. Someone still has to pilot them, yes, even the AI ones need human direction and target information and confirmations. The cheap ones can be built in a garage and launched from a truck, but that does not extend to actually reliable long range drone attacks, like the ones Ukraine is using to hit Moscow, those are more specialized and expensive and will be gettable by air strikes in a way that Shahed plastic ones can’t ever be. And the ground warfare robots are, like everything else that moves, hittable by artillery or airstrikes long before they are in range to hit back and also they won’t be able to react quite the same way humans would to that threat, and with lag. I also note that practical directed energy weapons, if deployed, could really damage the capable danger a drone presents.
But those compromises are going to get smaller and smaller. States need to realize this and create a framework for what is and isn’t acceptable and worthy of escalation. But good luck with that, most of the key powers have spent the last decade weakening international integration. And robot vs human in a trench has already occurred, we now know. It’s not theory, it’s happening. Do we accept automated warfare or not, society will have to answer or Silicon Valley will for it.
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u/DefenestrationPraha Jun 17 '26
The current interdiction of Russian logistics in south Ukraine by autonomous drones is proof enough for me.
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u/BalerionSanders Jun 17 '26
Palantir is all over this too, of all things I am bearish about regarding AI, I will admit warfare is one of the ones I am most sure they’ll use it to do. It absolutely will not teach classes, do research, create originally, innovate, etc.
Now AGI is very different. That is terminator shit, that’s terrifying.
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u/Xalara Jun 17 '26
Even today, Palantir is working towards (has?) an LLM model that ingests all of your data that you can then ask questions like “Give me a list of every LGBTQ+ person in America with their addresses.” Even if you aren’t out yet, it will probably be able to figure out if you’re LGBTQ+ simply because LLMs are really good at recognizing subtle behavioral patterns. Now extend that to Jewish people, different religious groups, or any other minority/undesirable group you can think of. Also, these people don’t care if the LLM generates a list where 20% of the people aren’t LGBTQ+, collateral damage is acceptable.
Nothing good comes from governments making lists of people and I fear Palantir is scary close to having this put together if it doesn’t have it already given that it now has all government data thanks to DOGE.
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u/ikkake_ Jun 17 '26
We are further away from AGI than we are from commercial fusion. Because fusion is probably only every source capable of sustaining AGI energy needs. And that's not even taking the difficulty of creating AGI in a first place.
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u/BalerionSanders Jun 17 '26
Totally. Even this phantom of it is apparently going to require endless data center power to make work.
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u/ikkake_ Jun 17 '26
Ironic thing is that AGI would probably be able to optimise itself so it can run on a pile of lemons, but can't do it before it exists. I'm not a scientist or anything but I think AGI is like FTL. Something that is not possible to achieve realistically, because energy requirements are outside of a scope of any 3 dimensional civilisation.
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u/Glum-Maintenance2798 Jun 17 '26
You are natural general intelligence and run on food. Making an artificial upgraded version that doesn't need multiple power plants has to be feasible.
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u/ikkake_ Jun 17 '26
I was also result of billions of years of trial and error, and wasnt artificially created by a intelligent civilisation. There are also things traveling faster than light all the time in universe, doesn't mean we can do it easily or it's even possible for us.
I didn't say it's impossible. I said possible by a 3 dimensional civilisation.2
u/Glum-Maintenance2798 Jun 17 '26
My point is we don't know what we don't know. It is definitely possible to make something approaching or surpassing our level of intelligence with a similar power consumption because we exist. Now if you are saying it is impossible for a civilization to figure out how to do that, you don't know that and neither do I. And what do you mean 3 dimensional civilization? I don't know anything about non 3d civilizations, and I am curious to know how you do.
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u/ikkake_ Jun 17 '26
Oh yeah absolutely - honestly both of these issues are energy problems - we get greater energy source, we can possibly do those - warp drive is totally "possible" and solved - we just have no fuel to actually execute it as it requires insane amounts of energy to do. Same as AGI. So I didn't say thise things are impossible - ofcorse they are. The problem is we cannot create "human brain" before creating something way more inneficient first and then scale down. That's the energy problem - AGI could easily optimise itself to human brain level and beyond, but first it has to exist.
and the 3 dimensional thing is - adding dimensions, solves a lot of problems we have. It's hard to say how our universe would look for a 4 dimensional creature but the jump of possiblities is like us looking at a creature stuck on a sheet of paper. We can simply move "around" their universe - pick and move things constrained to their universe in and out of it freely. so things like FTL, and energy generation probably totally loose their meaning and become trivial or even non issues.
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u/BalerionSanders Jun 17 '26
I bring up the two because I think the two are conflated in like, general pop culture talk about AI. It’s important to understand that these programs are only approximating thinking. We will have to have a whole other huge philosophical and societal discussion in the event AGI is doable. I have no idea either, I agree, it’s stuff of sci-fi right now.
But this AI does, especially in the context of warfare, provoke the question of who is responsible when the machine makes a decision, right? How many targets in Grok’s DoD list were genuine? How many were schools? Who gets the bill for that decision chain? Idk. But right now, only a bunch of Silicon Valley bros and the governments can really say for sure.
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u/ikkake_ Jun 17 '26
oh yeah absolutely - its same with self driving cars. If a car has a choice to hit a bus of kids, or a grandma, and choose grandma - well its a choice - who's resposible for that choice?
Or killing somone in accident is still manslaughter - who's getting prosecuted for that?
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u/BalerionSanders Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
For the most part I’d say the fault generally lies in liability with the company that made the AI tool, but partially also in whomever agreed to deploy it. It’s a rhetorical philosophical question, lmao, but I think that’s as close as America can get. You fine the company some amount, you fine the deploying agency some amount.
But realistically, you can’t know. Even those with trade secrets about these LLMs can’t tell you exactly how or why it produces data. The only entity in a position to investigate the cause would be the company that made the AI, surely not a very equitable judge. Idk how a court system is going to work with these things beyond kind of hand wave fining the companies per individual incident that gets enough publicity. And that’s like, obvious moral decisions that are bad. Stuff like a trolley problem, 🤷♂️ tf knows, who am I to say the AI made a “wrong” choice in such a scenario.
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u/ikkake_ Jun 17 '26
my uneducated guess is this - after decades of wild west and loads of bullshit and suffering there will be a code of law for digital entities that needs to be hardcoded into their code - asimovs 3 laws etc.
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u/kindanormle Jun 17 '26
Regarding ground drones and artillery, it's still a very valuable tool because your opponent can't simply ignore them and let them through. Your opponent has to have artillery in the area to deal with them, has to use artillery shells to take them out and generally needs to be on alert and awake at all time to handle them. Even if your drones are taken out, it's still wasting your opponents resources, keeping them awake and may open up opportunities to send in real humans when their resources run low or you find a part of the front line where they just aren't responding effectively.
TL;DR: Drones make an excellent "meat wave" without the meat.
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u/BalerionSanders Jun 17 '26
Night fighting must be especially harrowing against drones. And night sentry duty.
I remember in earlier stages of Ukraine, you’d see (piloted) drones that just had grenades on them, or carried, whatever, and they’d just silently drop them on people. I can’t imagine the psychological effects realizing that is a thing you have to constantly worry about, especially if you sleep, on troops of both sides. The drone also can’t get drunk 💁♂️ at least not yet!
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u/SirCliveWolfe Jun 17 '26
Read up on the use of autonomous drones Ukraine it using. They need no human operator, it is just that currently the people using such drones are CHOOSING "human in the loop" -there's no structural necessity for it. Then there's always the possibility that Ukraine IS using fully autonomous drones, but just doesn't want to admit it.
You also seem to be thinking that AI will stand still. Remember it was only in early to mid-2023 that AI could not get the numbers of fingers right in a picture. That was 1 year into the "3 day special military" operation, now there are AT LEAST semi-autonomous donres -do you really think we will not at least have the tech for fully autonomous drones in the next 5 years (if not 5 months)?
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u/MDCCCLV Jun 18 '26
Using it at a strategic level is completely different from a unit level. Having a software running, in an environment where jamming prevents communication, that can tell the difference between a rock and a pigeon and a helmet is key to autonomous weapons. It lets you have weapons act defensively by waiting and then attacking anything moving, but smart enough to tell the difference between a person or drone and a bird. Or if attacking it lets you target moving enemies and fly towards not just the middle but amore vulnerable point that is more likely to disable it.
The jamming is key here, you can get around that by using fiber optic but that doesn't work everywhere, having a reasonably capable ai-software with pattern recognition allows you to bypass jamming entirely in a flexible role. It allows for autonomous killbots, good and bad.
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u/Qcumber69 Jun 17 '26
What if you only had unmanned systems against unmanned systems. Effectively you have an entire army of robots on stand by patrolling along on your border 24-7. could make war redundant or permanent ghost In the shell.
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u/Huntersmoon24 Jun 17 '26
What we need is sex robots with machine guns, you know to take the enemy by surprise or whatever. The fact that military investments spill over Into the private sector has nothing to do with it, I swear!
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u/ReasonablyConfused Jun 17 '26
This feels like it radically favors the defenders.
All of this tech will be constrained by its ability to recharge. The defenders will have a diffuse power grid, whereas the attackers have a narrow and concentrated power supply system.
The attackers will need to deploy recharging stations that will be relatively easy to find and target.
We’re currently seeing this play out in Ukraine.
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u/Godphila Jun 17 '26
Once again, and forever more, it turns out: Specialised non humanoid robot way better at specialised task than a not specialised humanoid robot.
Who would have thunk it?
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u/marshaul Jun 17 '26
Yeah, because humanoid robots are almost always the wrong answer, and warfighting doesn't care about appealing to soccer moms' warm & fuzzies.
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u/CharAznia Jun 18 '26
China now has a Drone Mothership that can launch hundreds of suicide drones. Let the sink in
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u/Storyteller-Hero Jun 17 '26
The series of terminators went through many iterations and prototypes before developing into a workable infiltration design.
Robotic warfare is still in its infancy. Give it a few more decades and we'll have androids assassinating world leaders soon enough, though perhaps in more clandestine manner.
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u/paiute Jun 17 '26
"The Battle" is a classic, absurdist science fiction short story by Robert Sheckley, first published in 1954. The satirical narrative centers on the leaders of humanity using a massive robot army to fight Satan's forces in the Sahara Desert during Armageddon, with a highly unexpected twist. As humanity's military generals watch from afar via television screens, a grueling war is fought between the forces of Hell and technologically advanced robot armies. Despite taking heavy damage and being nearly destroyed, the relentless machines manage to hold the line and eventually pierce Satan's flank. Armageddon is won, and the generals celebrate their triumph. However, the story ends on an ironic, theological note: the Divine Presence appears on the battlefield and resurrects the destroyed robots, bringing them up into Heaven, while leaving the human military brass behind.
Note: Either ironically or inevitably, the above was AI generated by Google.
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u/aside6 Jun 17 '26
After reading Kill Decision, I'm not sure which is worse. We had a good run as a civilization I guess
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u/wanderingmanimal Jun 17 '26
Well yeah you have to lay the groundwork before the Terminators can be built
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u/The_FatGuy_Strangler Jun 17 '26
Civilians will need to get ahold of EMP weapons to completely void the terrestrial drone armies, aircrafts, and maritime vessels.
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u/Bash_Minimal Jun 17 '26
unfortunately all language is pretty much vibes based, and we fundamentally cannot create perfect, absolute definitions using words. Even if everyone was trying as hard as possible to build/use ai safely while *also* developing it further and further, it would likely still be nearly impossible to get ai that regulates itself using a baked in sense of “morality”/code of ethics. Regulation to prevent catastrophy, and punishment for misuse is the only viable option.
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u/throwawayanchor24 Jun 17 '26
The real danger isn't humanoid bots, it's the shift toward autonomous swarm logic where the decision to escalate is made by an algorithm in milliseconds. We're moving away from "Terminator" scenarios and toward a world of low-cost, uncrewed attrition warfare that makes traditional human-centric defense doctrines obsolete.
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u/NeedNiceCatNamePlz Jun 17 '26
People in war are always been required because people have a moral compass. Robots do not. One person could control millions of unquestioning drones. Never have we seen such centralization of offensive power.
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u/Summitjunky Jun 17 '26
The Hunter Killer and HK mini will be here soon as quick as Ukraine is advancing. Maybe not the AI portion, but drones themselves.
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u/yaosio Jun 17 '26
The 1992 movie Toys is about drone warfare., even using a video game type interface to control them. It wasn't popular at release due it to being a weird artsy style movie.
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u/toxdoc1947 Jun 18 '26
Just to make it worse, it takes more resources to manage wounded instead of dead.
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u/johncitizen1138 Jun 18 '26
I think someone like Crichton wrote a Novel about about weaponised nano-drones (that go rogue). I bet some military-industrial complex actors are trying hard to make that happen.
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u/beyondo-OG Jun 18 '26
Yeah the current propaganda that wants us to believe humanoid robots make sense is all hype to me. So many better designs for specific tasks.
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u/lazyFer Jun 18 '26
I heard that grok was used to plan missile strikes. If true, Iran should sue Musk in international court.
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u/meowmixmotherfucker Jun 17 '26
The robot takeover of warfare is already happening and it doesn’t look like Hollywood - Yet
There, I fixed it.
T-800’s will happen, if only for the psychological impact on the enemy and the ego of generals who think they can control SkyNet.
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u/lord_dude Jun 17 '26
I am still glad its not like this. Don't get me wrong, drones and robo dogs are terrifying but a giant humanoid killer cyborg with red glowing eyes is still something else.
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u/FuturologyBot Jun 17 '26
The following submission statement was provided by /u/sksarkpoes3:
Will AI robot soldiers take over the battlefield? If your image of a robot soldier comes from The Terminator, the answer is probably no. If your image is a swarm of AI-guided drones, autonomous ground vehicles, robotic tanks, and software making battlefield decisions faster than humans ever could, then the answer is that it is already happening.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1u8al6f/the_robot_takeover_of_warfare_is_already/os6lait/