Electronic warfare

Jammers, Not Terminators: DARPA & The Future Of Robotics

Robophobes, relax. The robot revolution is not imminent. Machine brains have a lot to learn about the messy physical world, said DARPA director Arati Prabhakar. Instead, DARPA sees some of the most promising applications for artificial intelligence in the intangible realm of radio waves. That includes electronic warfare — jamming and spoofing — as well as a newly launched “grand challenge” on spectrum management: allocating and reallocating frequencies among users according to demand more nimbly than a human mind could manage, let alone the federal bureaucracy. In short, don’t think Terminators: think jammers.

“Where it works well, we’re finding amazing new applications for artificial intelligence,” Prabhakar told an Atlantic Council conference this morning, extolling DARPA’s new unmanned ship, the Sea Hunter. “But we also see a technology that is still quite fundamentally limited.”

For example, feeding enough test images into a “machine learning” algorithm can teach it to recognize real objects remarkably well. Prabhakar cited a system that correctly identified an orange-vested construction worker on the side of the road — an important thing for, say, a driverless car to be able to recognize and avoid.