>It's true that that is far
>off in the future, but
>what about systems where a
>tank would be given commands
>from a person far off
>from the battlefield? Like
>people playing videogames where the
>videogame is actually an actual
>battle. It could only
>work for vehicles so infantry
>would obviously have to be
>humans still, but planes could
>pretty much become "remote-controlled"
.
The problem with your way of thinking is that it is embedded in the paradigm of current warfare, where combat takes place in "real time" and decisions need to be made quickly "on instinct" rather than planned out. As you "think faster" time appears to slow down. You could say that time moves at the speed of your thought, so time acutally might "fly" when you're having fun. Say the AI of a system was in a computer that ran, oh, a million times faster than our vision and mind operates, which is about 60-100hz. The machine could perceive reality a million times slower than our minds, and make far more decisions in that amount of time.
Imagine a flying sphere, launched by an extremely large howitzer cannon with many small guns lining the exterior of it. In mid-air it acquires all targets visible, identifies them, and isolates weakness points, known and predicted, and identifies probably and possible trajectories on all of them. All of this occurs in a hundreth of a second or so. Then as the sphere travels the guns move on the body with extreme speed and fire their load. As soon as the bullets can hit their targets hundreds of "slow" targets are disabled or severely damaged.
Imagine also, a "mobile sniper rifle," that is really just a projectile accelerator attached to, first generation, a small wheeled vehicle, but later on, perhaps a micro-legged system that can climb into tight spots and assemble the accelerator on demand. This bot is merely told what the target is and let free and it seeks out a location to hide and does "perfect" physical movement predictions on its target, say an important political figure. It only needs one shot, unless deflected, it can't actually miss a target based on bad aiming.
But on the other end, by the politcial figure to be shot, there are counter-bots. Scanning all visible areas simultaneously, the bot detects a fast moving objects headed in the direction of the political figure. To counter the attack, it launches its own shot to deflect the incoming shot and at the same time launches a shot at the sniper unit it has back-traced the shot from. Now imagine that kind of protection on every kind of vehicle.
All of this kind of thinking is one reason why when I saw Star Wars 1 and 2 (both sucked), I thought it unrealistic that any kind of "clone" or other lifeform could actually beat a droid. Hell, if they were that dumb, why didn't they use powerful tanks that could rattle off many more shots and have better armor?
I expect by that time a lot of reality will be virtualized and such battles in reality will be a stalemate, much like the nuclear weapon situation nowadays.
Just prepare for a change in the combat paradigm. Humans may soon only be top-level generals, not in any direct control of the actual battling.
-Xotor-
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[table width=200" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0][tr bgcolor=#000000] [td style=font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 8px] [/td][td align=left" valign="middle" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 36px; font-weight: bold; color: #FF0000; text-decoration: none]PAS:[/td][td align=left" valign="top" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; color: #FF0000] [/td][td align=left" valign="middle" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; color: #FF0000]People Against Stupidity[/td][/tr][tr bgcolor=#000000" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 8px][td] [/td][td align=left" valign="top" colspan="3] [/td][/tr][tr bgcolor=#000000" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-weight: normal; color: #FFFFFF] [td] [/td][td align=left" valign="top" colspan="3]"Ignorance is excusable. Stupidity is not."[/td][/tr][/table][/div]
