Human fascination with robots has long been fused with fear. The first widespread use of the term came a century ago in a Czech play about robots manufactured to serve and work for people. The bots turn on their masters. That plot has played out in fiction countless times since. Meanwhile, the real world has created ever more advanced versions of mechanical servants.

Human fascination with robots has long been fused with fear. The first widespread use of the term came a century ago in a Czech play about robots manufactured to serve and work for people. The bots turn on their masters. That plot has played out in fiction countless times since. Meanwhile, the real world has created ever more advanced versions of mechanical servants.

Infantry Soldiers with 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, fire an FGM-148 Javelin during a combined arms live fire exercise in Jordan on August 27, 2019, in support of Eager Lion - file photo. A small group of maneuvering infantry soldiers will soon be able to target and destroy enemy tanks at night from distances up to 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) -- by firing portable, man-carried Javelin Anti-Tank Missiles engineered with a new generation of targeting optics. The U.S. Army and Raytheon plan to enter production of a new Lightweight Command Launch Unit for the Javelin designed to bring a new level of "precision lethality to an infantry squad." The new Lightweight CLU unit enables much greater standoff distance for infantry attacking tanks by doubling the attack range from 2.5km to 4.5km, developers said. "You have to be able to speed up the kill chain and detect the adversary before he can detect you. You want to get a launch shot off before he knows you are there. It all starts with sensing," Tommy Boccardi, Javelin Domestic Business Development, Raytheon, told Warrior.

The US military is massively speeding the development of AI to reduce soldier casualties, according to Fox News on Thursday. The establishment of high-speed, multi-domain warfare by 2030, in which AI technology can take advantage of'networks' to hit multiple targets with Hellfire missiles as a means of decreasing the risk faced by soldiers in the field is a primary objective of the Army's emerging AI Task Force. Easely outlined the current difficulty of amalgamating data, explaining that today's methods have "stovepiped" sensor systems, which organise vast amounts of incoming data. AI will streamline and "fuse" disparate sources to build a "sensor fusion" throughout multiple combat platforms. The Brigadier General included Multi-Spectral sensors and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) as examples of technologies that will benefit from AI-empowered data processing.

File photo - Troopers with the U.S. Army 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division fire the main gun round at a target during unit gunnery practice with newly acquired M1A1-SA Abrams tanks at Fort Stewart, Georgia, U.S. March 29, 2018. Picture taken March 29, 2018. The targets are dispersed across expansive, mountainous terrain, yet moving in coordination for attack. The armored vehicle cannot fire upon the enemy tanks and give away its position, so it "networks" the targeting specifics to an armed overhead drone which then attacks the enemy tanks -- exploding them with Hellfire missiles, all without putting soldiers at risk. In similar fashion - perhaps a forward operating unmanned ground vehicle receives the targeting information and, controlled by a human operator, fires on the enemy tanks without exposing the location of a manned crew.