Artificial intelligence, or AI, is now a part of our society; from Alexa to facial recognition software, we interact with different kinds of artificial intelligence every day. However, over the last few years continuous research and development has led to a new kind of AI: autonomous drones.
The use of drones in the military is nothing new. In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, the United States used drones as spy planes in order to obtain imagery intelligence from behind enemy lines and the 1970s saw Israel begin to use drones as decoys in the Yom Kippur War. Up until this point military drones were still relatively new technology; as a result, during the decades that followed, the United States started to invest more into developing more cost-efficient drones. In the 1990s the U.S. government began “The Predator Program”, which eventually led to the creation of the MQ-1 Predator. These drones were not yet autonomous, instead they were unmanned remote controlled aircrafts that could conduct a variety of tasks.
Despite already having drones integrated into the military by the turn of the 20th century, the catalyst that sparked a sharp increase in the research, development, and use of more advanced drones in the United States was 9/11. Following the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror, drones have been used to surveil areas unsafe for troops, as well as carry out airstrikes on intended targets. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that from 2015 to 2020, more than 14,000 drone strikes were conducted in Afghanistan alone. The continous use of drone strikes has raised questions over their accuracy and more importantly over the unintended casualties they leave behind. Nonetheless, the United States has continued to invest more money into drone development.
For years, drones used in the military were operated by remote pilots; however, recent drone models have seen a change to autonomous drones. In March 2020, during a military conflict in Libya the first autonomous drone, or lethal autonomous weapons system was used. This military-grade drone, the KARGU, was powered by artificial intelligence thus making it capable of identifying and killing its own targets without a remote human operator. The U.S. counts on such autonomous drones as one of its biggest threats in the battlefield and the latest models are what is called a kamikaze drone. These drones are small, low-cost, and difficult to detect; they are able to distinguish targets and then execute them by crashing into them.
Advances in artificial intelligence algorithms, sensors, and electronics have made it possible to build autonomous systems, such that the number of countries that now have armed autonomous drones is over 100.
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