A look back at the future of computing: Kamikaze drones in the Ukraine war give a foretaste of how military armament could develop in the AI age. Plus: useful XR ideas and a pretty fast robot.
Artificial Intelligence commonly stands for automation at a high level: machines learning to do complex processes or tasks that were previously the preserve of humans. One day, the AI vision is that systems may be able to seek out tasks on their own, significantly outperforming human performance and thus contributing significantly to the prosperity and freedom of mankind.
Less flowery, but equally important, is the use of AI in the military.
- NATO announced in 2021 that it would invest $1 billion in AI.
- In 2020, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke of the "army of the future" in which AI would play an essential role.
- The U.S. defense agency DARPA is conducting third-wave research on artificial intelligence, and the U.S. Army is already experimenting with AI-controlled fighter jets.
- If U.S. sources are to be believed, China has also been investing heavily in military AI for years.
My colleague Maximilian Schreiner describes why Russia's war in Ukraine is becoming a testbed of the power of simple autonomous weapons and how insights from this application could impact the future of deterrence.
>> Autonomous Weapons in the Ukraine War: The Future of Deterrence
Future of computers now!
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Mark Zuckerberg and Co. want to bring VR and AR into the mainstream. Entertainment, communication and games, in particular, play a major role here. But the technologies can also be useful in other (sometimes unusual) areas.
>> 6 areas in which VR and AR are useful
Look at that ? ??
AI researchers have extensively trained a dog robot in a simulation and successfully unleashed it in real life. The thing is crazy fast, agile, and another indication that model-free reinforcement learning is an important building block of the AI future.
>> Robot dog breaks speed record - high-speed thanks to AI
