To that end, NASA on April 2 awarded a $247.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, Calif., to build the X-plane and deliver it to the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California by the end of 2021.
Source: nasa.gov
A report from Gizmodo says that Google is partnering with the United States Department of Defense and building drone software. The project will reportedly apply Google’s usual machine learning prowess to identify objects in drone footage. Google’s involvement in the project wasn’t public, but it was apparently discussed internally at Google last week and leaked.
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The potential harm of A.I.s deliberately designed to kill in warfare is much more pressing. The U.S. and other countries are working hard to develop military A.I., in the form of automated weapons, that enhance battlefield capabilities while exposing fewer soldiers to injury or death. For the U.S., this would be a natural extension of the existing imperfect drone warfare program—failures in military intelligence have led to the mistaken killing of non-combatants in Iraq.
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