Autonomous Weapons

Rapid technological changes can radically transform the way warfare is fought.  In this instance, the improvements we are seeing in machine cognition are making possible something new: autonomous weapons.  

What does this mean?   If you look up the word autonomy, you'll see lots of competing definitions from technologists and sociologists.  Most of these definitions are so complex and convoluted, they require entire research reports to fully explain the definition.  To simplify things a bit, I've developed a somewhat easier definition that will scale nicely with current technological trends.  

A weapon is autonomous if makes its own decisions.  

This makes autonomous weapons different than the weapons we have today.  Although many of the weapons we use today are smart, they don't make decisions on their own.  They are simply following the instructions of their human beings that made them.  This means that when a precision guided munition (PGM) is fired at a target, it is simply following the instructions it was given (relentlessly, terminator style) until it finds its target.  In contrast, autonomous weapons develop their own ways of solving problems.  They can accomplish this by mining big data sets, interacting with simulations and through real world exercise.  

This should sound familiar.  Think for a moment about how you learned to throw and catch a ball.  You didn't need a formal education to learn this or knowledge of physics or math to do it.  You learn to do it by doing it.  You learned it through experience.  These new weapons can do the same thing.  They can learn to do something by doing it.   The simple fact that these new weapons can build their own ways to accomplish missions and they aren't reliant on human beings for the instructions/models/approaches necessary to do it, makes them autonomous.