Late last year, around the time Russia was pummeling Ukraine's energy grid with flying drones and Ukraine was pummeling Russia's navy with floating drones, we asked senior writer Will Knight for a story about the future of war. The assignment brought him not to the Black Sea but to the Persian Gulf, where the US Navy was getting ready to test-drive an armada of robot ships. OK, "armada" may be an overstatement. One of the uncrewed vessels, Knight writes, looked like "a solar-powered kayak." Another looked like "a Google Street View car on pontoons." None of them carried weapons. Still, they represented the profound shift that is taking place in militaries all over the world—a shift toward robotics and artificial intelligence, toward autonomous military machines. In Knight's encounters with these systems, from the top-gun AI that flies F-16s better than active-duty Air Force pilots to the sailing drone that can dive when it senses danger, he begins to see what the future of conflict may bring. "We don't want to start World War III," one military contractor tells him. But that's the question: Will AI make everything better, or will it make everything fall apart?—Anthony Lydgate | Features Editor |
