The Era Of Autonomous Army Bots is Here

When the average person thinks about AI and robots what often comes to mind are post-apocalyptic visions of scary, super-intelligent machines taking over the world, or even the universe. The Terminator movie series is a good reflection of this fear of AI, with the core technology behind the intelligent machines powered by Skynet, referred to as an "artificial neural network-based conscious group mind and artificial general superintelligence system". However, the AI of today looks nothing like the worrisome science fiction representation. Rather, AI is performing many tedious and manual tasks and providing value from recognition and conversation systems to predictive analytics pattern matching and autonomous systems. In that context, the fact that governments and military organizations are investing heavily in AI shouldn't be as much concerning as it is intriguing. The ways that machine learning and AI are being implemented are both mundane from the perspective of enabling humans to do their existing tasks better, and very interesting seeing how machines are being made more intelligent to give humans better understanding and control of the environment around them.