Oldfart,
That’s DARPA’s goal.
Remember that the internet - not the Web, the
internet – was created by DARPA.
Look what happened to that Pentagon funded project. This technology won’t be the first time that one of DARPA’s swords has been beaten into a ploughshare! No possible way this one stops with Uncle Sam’s Freedom Fighters!
This is an integration event – not new ideas.
The GPS technology was freed up by Clinton in 2000 (I think). The sensor integration is a function of commercial multiprocessor parallel communication. Object discrimination is a function of Hard AI. You have to love this one – the functionality of the CPUs scattered throughout these machines was a direct spin off of DARPA funded
VLSI research!
While I still disagree with PalaceGuard about his more speculative projections of future computer power, I feel confident that at the current rate of improvement, the likelihood of cars driving themselves in 50 years is, as Dr. Thrun of the Stanford team said, “a no-brainer”.
To your point in re the military applications: yes, it remains a real, present, and in my opinion an increasing danger. As the “human cost” of initiating military engagements decreases with the introduction of pilotless war vehicles (air, and now land) the probability of each one being realized increases. If you want a nightmare scenario, imagine if you will, a brigade of M1A2s approaching a city – and they are unmanned. The support vehicles (fuel & munitions) could also be, but probably wouldn’t be autonomous (the fog of war, etc), but air superiority could be secured by UAVs.
In closing, the Genie is out of the bottle. We’ll never get it back in. We have all seen how difficult it has been managing proliferation of WMDs – both the successes as well as the failures. This one has NO state secrets – NONE, NADA, ZILCH. Won’t this be fun to manage?