Swarm Intelligence

Anyone read the book “Prey” by Michael Crichton? The story describes an artificial intelligence experiment gone awry, where the computing power of a swarm of nanobots increasing exponentially at an accelerating rate, and pose a threat to all living things. Sounds scary, doesn’t it?

Well, you can rest easy for now, as the aforementioned scenario is highly implausible with existing technology (keyword here being existing). It does, however, have it roots with current military and aerospace technology.

In loose terms, swarm intelligence details the process of complex, intricate behaviours that emerge from a substantial amount of individual program sets following simple rules. To phrase this in layman terms, imagine a colony of termites. Somehow, somewhere along the line, the termites figured out the best approach to gathering food sources and constructing hives. No leader gave an order to carry out any of the aforementioned activities; it just happened.

How would this be applied to existing military strategies? Well, imagine a group of tanks defending the border of our country. Now, let’s take a step further, and say that all 20 of those tanks were unmanned, and relied on swarm artificial intelligence. On their own, the tanks can detect rapidly approaching threats and neutralize them with extreme prejudice; but when supplied with aerial data from unmanned drones and fed with data from geosynchronous satellites, the country’s borders would effectively be impervious to attack, as the networked intelligence linked to both the ground and aerial vehicles provide an unprecedented amount of data that can be analysed and utilized by the defense forces.

Too much to digest? Well, think Terminator, where we are the humans (well duh), and Skynet are the robots (what else would they be). We would be curb-stomped, and slaughtered. Arnold Schwarzenegger would be proud. (297 words)

Written by Thinesh and Kaza

References:

Tucker,P.(2014). Defense One. Inside the Navy's Secret Swarm Robot Experiment. [Online] 5 October 2014. Available from http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/10/inside-navys-secret-swarm-robot-experiment/95813/ [Accessed 26 September 2015]