Warfare

China Is Building a Fleet of Autonomous AI

A fleet of autonomous, AI-powered submarines is headed into hotly-contested Asian waterways. The vehicles will belong to the Chinese armed forces, and their mission capabilities are likely to raise concerned eyebrows in surrounding countries. If all goes to plan, the first submarines will launch in 2020.

US Employee in China Suffers Brain Injury in Case Recalling Cuba

The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21T

There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize.

The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload

CIA plans to replace spies with AI

Human spies will soon be relics of the past, and the CIA knows it. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Agency’s deputy director for technology development, recently told an audience at an intelligence conference in Florida the CIA was adapting to a new landscape where its primary adversary is a machine, not a foreign agent.

Quantum radar will expose stealth aircraft

Researchers at the University of Waterloo are developing a new technology that promises to help radar operators cut through heavy background noise and isolate objects—including stealth aircraft and missiles—with unparalleled accuracy.

China’s Strategic Ambiguity and Shifting Approach to Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems

A ‘Quantum Radar’ System Will Watch for Stealth Aircraft and Missiles in the Arctic

NASA X-Plane Construction Begins

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.

The Case Against an Autonomous Military

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.

World War II carrier “Lady Lex” found 2 miles under sea by Allen expedition

Google helps Pentagon analyze military drone footage—employees “outraged”

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.