US Army’s acquisition chief, Bruce Jette, has ordered the service’s famed night vision lab to develop an experimental “automated turret” for live-fire testing next June.
The BAE Griffin III, a leading candidate for the Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, mounts the same 50 mm gun that would be used in the ATLAS automated turret.
Army sources confirmed to Breaking Defense that the turret will use the lab’s Artificially Intelligent Targeting System (ATLAS), designed to detect potential targets, determine if they’re hostile and aim a 50mm cannon with superhuman speed and accuracy.
But — note the pause — ATLAS will not pull the trigger because it will not have a physical connection to the trigger mechanism, leaving the final decision to fire literally in human hands.
In the future, however, Jette told me in an interview, the Army might explore a less hands-on form of control. A human officer might, for example, look at surveillance data, like live imagery from a drone, and clear a platoon of robots to open fire on a whole group of targets, he said. (This would appear to meet the standard of having a human “on the loop”.) While Jette didn’t discuss the technical details, this approach would require the kind of automated trigger that ATLAS currently lacks.
Even this set-up probably wouldn’t violate the Defense Department’s remarkably nuanced policy requiring human control of lethal force, and the Defense Secretary could waive the policy if it did. But it would certainly alarm activists who are already skeptical of ATLAS, arguing it could easily be modified to bypass human control, and who seek a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems. The danger of such systems is not just that they might run rogue and kill the wrong people, skeptics say, but that a human overseer might blindly trust what the computer tells him — a phenomenon known as automation bias.