Inside the Warfighting Lab at Quantico, Virigna, the Marine Corps is busy building battlefield robots to operate in independent teams. Remote-controlled robots and drones currently perform tasks from explosive ordnance disposal to airstrikes, but remote control requires a controller. “We need to move toward autonomy,” Colonel Jim “Jinx” Jenkins said in a presentation at the Association for Unmanned Systems International’s Xponential conference, Ars Technica reports.
Jenkins and his team at the Marine Corps have developed the Unmanned Tactical Autonomous Control and Collaboration (UTACC) program with the intent to train drones to act in “multidimensional uncrewed system teaming.” In other words, the Marine Corps wants these machines to operate as autonomous swarms, collaborating with each other like a well-drilled unit of troops, to support human soldiers in the field.
Despite the benefits of deploying remote-controlled robots and drones, these machines take their operators out of the fight. Jenkins explained how operators often become vulnerable, as they focus on the robots’ tactics and positioning rather than their own. Thus, the operator needs another soldier to guard his or her back. “A marine is driving [the drone], so we haven’t improved our manpower situation, and sometimes it costs more manpower,” he said.
One of the UTACC’s initial conceptual tests involves a land-based robot supported by an airborne drone. According to Jenkins, “The ground vehicle launches the air vehicle to fill in gaps in its sensor picture,” which they then relay back to an operator. Cargo carrying is another application considered by the Marine Corps, which has already funded development and testing of robots that load ammunition on and off helicopters, thousands of feet over rough terrain, to secluded military posts.
Though the robot teams may be relatively autonomous, Jenkins raised concerns about letting robots roam entirely independently and insisted human operators will still play an integral role in their deployment. He said, “As you talk about unmanned systems, the topic of trust comes up. At what point am I going to trust a machine to pull the trigger? As we start to let machines make decisions for us, we can’t give up basic human judgement.”
Google has been finding more ways to make Gemini a part of your daily routine, from putting together playlists to ordering groceries through your favorite apps. Now it's expanding those capabilities to more services, with Google Search joining in, too.
The company has announced a new Connected Apps Platform that makes it easier for developers to bring their services to both Gemini and Search. Alongside this, Google is adding new partners to its growing lineup, bringing more of the apps people already use into its AI ecosystem.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.