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NancyLebovitz comments on Open thread, September 15-21, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Because warfare is complicated? Are you talking about drone robots?
The word drone refer to something that flies. You could miss flying and non-flying robots.
What's the bottleneck, where robots don't perform?
probably a lot more
Prolonged functioning at high energy levels far from usable energy sources.
To what extend are those issue likely to be resolved in 10 to 20 years to an extend that they change the geopolitical situation?
Not very likely. In 10-20 years we might get a self-driving car which is a MUCH easier problem than a battlefield robot.
Google already has self-driving cars. The issue is more about making them safe enough that they don't get sued to the ground when the cars get into accidents. Additionally you need to pass laws that make them legal.
Military technology doesn't suffer from the same hurdle.
Kinda sorta maybe not really.
Dammit, I've got to pay more attention to those feelings of "really?" Driverless cars at current levels of tech seemed faintly implausible, but I ignored that in favor of "I keep hearing it in the news" and "google=magic".
On the other hand, self-driving cars might make sense for slow-moving traffic jams.
Huh, looks like I've been fooled by journalists again. Thanks!
On the other hand, they have to drive through terrain that has been intentionally modified to be difficult for their algorithms.
I'd guess that communications are a problem - you'd need more bandwidth to send enough video back to drive a car remotely than to fly a plane, and it's probably easier to lose contact, too. Not to mention the difficulties of fighting inside a city you don't want to simply destroy: can your robot open a door and go up a flight of stairs?
This is the kind of thing that's being researched by the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex, though.
This is where they've got to (scroll down to the archive link). It isn't yet anywhere near good enough for the task.
For remote rather than automonous operation, there would be major humanitarian applications as well, but the technical problems are still huge. There's latency and reliability of communications, terrain that would be challenging even for people on the spot, dexterity in confined spaces, and the problem of refuelling. None of this is a Simple Matter Of Engineering.
Noise.