entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 58 ] The Present
Roth includes the military's robotic manufacturing in his indictment.
This fits with the recent history of the U.S. military's attempts to automate
factories, which have left the U.S. civilian robot industry behind that of the
Japanese (Noble, 1986a). There have also been severe problems with the
semiautomated production of high-tech weapons such as the Harpoon,
Phoenix, and Sparrow missiles (M. Thompson, 1988).
DARPA has funded three- and four-legged hoppers and runners at
Carnegie-Mellon University, a six-legged machine at Ohio State, and
robot hands at Stanford University and the University of Utah. The Air
Force hired Marvin the Robot for minor maintenance, runway repairs,
fire fighting, and rearming of aircraft while a base is under attack. The
Army is developing robots for everything from security to the collection
of biochemically contaminated human remains (San Jose Mercury News
Staff, 1987). The Navy and Air Force are also developing teleoperated
systems (Aronson, 1984). Actually, most of what the military calls robots
are really these teleoperated systems, controlled from afar. Humans are
always "in the loop."
The B-l bomber is dependent on a number of automated repair programs
including expert systems. 8 Equipment breakdowns are far above predicted
levels, and the number of planes on alert will be lower than planned
because of them (Moore, 1987). The SCP project for a pilot's associate is
really five expert systems linked together to help the pilot fly, and even fight,
the plane. The proposed AirLand battle manager, for another example, will
operate at the corp level, and below, during general war. It will try and take
in all the possible information and display what it has been programmed to
consider relevant to the human officers. It is also supposed to eventually be
able to offer advice on what the enemy might be doing and how to counter
it, and even make troop deployment and logistical decisions to implement
its plans, and then cut and print out the orders itself. There were over 20
military research projects on expert systems in 1988 (Shah and Buckler, 1988,
pp. 15-21).
Expert systems that are to perform in domains where there is little
human expertise, or where what expertness there is cannot be reduced to
computer code, have a very poor record. Those two University of California
professors (of philosophy and engineering respectively), the brothers Hubert
and Stuart Dreyfus, argue in Mind over Machine (1985) that the best an AI
system can be is competent, since expertness depends on intuition, experience,
and other intangibles.
In the long run it does seem that limited "bit" AI systems can eventually
contribute to improved maintenance of military weapons and platforms, but
despite much effort coordinated by the Joint Services Working Group on
Artificial Intelligence in Maintenance, little can be expected until the next
century (Richardson, 1985).