Automated Wars

Automated wars
In our world today, wars are being fought openly and discretely. Warfare is becoming more sophisticated and intelligent. The weapons business has become a lucrative means of earning money for the parties involved. These parties sell war as a necessity for “our” wellbeing. However the promotion of war is not an easy task. War is known to cause destruction, it is the cause of many innocent deaths, more often than none wars do not resolve issues. For these reasons and many more, wars are not welcomed, people don’t want to be killed and for that matter kill others. But what if wars could be fought with precision? What if only the “bad” guys died? What if a machine calculated a threat level and made the decision to kill? This is the direction the modern warfare is headed towards. The ability for a machine to automatically locate and attack a target, with minimal human intervention is the focus of leading global militaries. Organizations such as United States Air Force (USAF) are focusing on artificial intelligence to conduct reconnaissance and make decisions based on their findings. However, are these intelligent machines going to work with us? Or will we eventually reach a point where we will have to fight the machines for our survival? This essay will evaluate this question and prove that a heavy reliance on artificial intelligence may eventually cause us more harm than good.
The USAF has released an action plan in which the main focus is to evolve existing unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to include artificial intelligence (AI) to make combat decisions, while acting within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input (June, 2009). The UAS have been in development for several years and are only recently being relied upon as dependable service machines. This technology, along with the assistance of humans were developed to allow forces to conduct “dull, dirty and dangerous missions, like searching tunnels and caves for...