At this point, this is enough autonomy to have a set of these guys man a howitzer (read as old stockpiles of weapons we already have). Kind of a scary thought. On one hand, I think the idea of moving real people out of danger in war is a good idea, and as an American i'd want Americans to have an edge... and we can't guarantee our enemies won't take it if we skip it, on the other hand I have a visceral reaction to machines killing people.

I think we're at an inflection point now where AI and robotics can be used in warfare, and we need to start having that conversation.

We already have an ongoing major war (in Ukraine) where both sides are using autonomous AI-driven drones that kill people, at scale, with escalating tit-for-tat advances in lethality. This conversation is being had alright.

We had sufficient AI to make death machines for decades. You don't need fancy LLMs to get a pretty good success rate for targeting.

I have said for years that the only thing keeping us from "stabby the robot" is solving the power problem. If you can keep a drone going for a week, you have a killing machine. Use blades to avoid running out of ammo. Use IR detection to find the jugular. Stab, stab and move on. I'm guessing "traditional" vision algorithms are also sufficient to, say, identify an ethnicity and conduct ethnic cleansing. We are "solving the power problem" away from a new class of WMDs that are accessible to smaller states/groups/individuals.

So you're concerned about remote operated howitzers? Autoloaders and remote control land vehicles have existed for 40 or so years by now. If we wanted remote controlled howitzers we could have fielded them already.

I don't understand we already saw exactly what happens with the emergence of drones and Israel is already using AI to select bombing targets and semi-autonomous turrets. What conversation? What kind of society do you think we are living in?

They don't look strong enough to pick up a 155mm shell even with both arms - and we haven't seen them pick up something with two arms.

This would have made a more interesting demo at least

Panzerhaubitze 2000 already has an autoloader and the entire point of self propelled artillery is that it moves after shooting to avoid counter artillery fire.