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It's for backup. Even in the article's first paragraphs it says this
So not used often and when it is used it's been for very tiny things instead of needing constant human attention like driving normally does.
So yeah autonomous drones will hopefully have some human oversight still. I don't want kill bots without any way to overrule them. But yes self driving cars are replacing the need for humans to drive.
We are not at Killbots yet, but we are approaching. Don't have to believe me, just look at the Anthropic/Hegseth spat recently where they clearly seem to believe automated AI weaponry is something to be worried about in the near future.
When the US and our military contractors are already having major discussions about fully autonomous no humans involved military technology, we should at least entertain the possibility that it's coming.
The tele-operations feature has not been used at all; it's unclear how often the Waymo robots need guidance. We know it's substantial enough to require a full time guidance staff (overseas) separate from the US-based "IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS" staff, but insubstantial enough that the staff is small (70 IIRC; Waymo has a fleet of thousands of cars, although they are not all in operation at the same time).
If on average 20 staff are making 1 decision every other minute (a fairly relaxed pace of operations for simple decisions) then every 24 hours 14,400 decisions are being made for a fleet of cars numbering around 4,000. Put it one way, this is MAGNITUDES more efficient than human drivers! Put it another way, "Waymo cannot operate without human intervention."
But this sort of "human on the loop" (and, mea culpa, possibly it is better to ID Waymo as an on the loop system - I suppose this might depend on how often it requires human intervention) technology is old news in the military; the Patriot was doing this (although not necessarily well) in the 1980s.
I am trying to tell you that we have had automated weaponry for decades. Automated weaponry is not ground-breaking technology. The ability to develop, field, and use automated weaponry does not mean that the technology stack to replace infantry exists at all, let alone at an acceptable price-point.
Humans can also not operate without human intervention, and unlike us, these machines are only getting better and better. What will self driving navigation be like in five years? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Maybe with very very minimal human input, one guy whose job is to sit in a room and two times a day he has to look up cause the screens beep at him that one in the millions (or billions?) of cars can't tell if that weird fuzzy light in the sky is a red light. Not that it really matters too much anyway, making a trivial mistake like that doesn't cause anyone to die, traffic accidents are just a vague memory. It just gives the dude in the car a minor annouance cause his trip is 9.5 minutes instead of 9.3. Except of course it might not be one guy, it might just be Claude.
And we've never had it like we do today. And we've never had it like we will in the upcoming decades.
Humans are getting better too, at least at combat. And, to my point, fitting them out with enhanced kit is only going to make them better. There's going to be a long period of time where human-machine pairing is much better at tasks like "clear this house" or "administer this food aid" than machines or humans will be by themselves. My guess is that you won't see something like "getting rid of infantryman" until after the infantryman has gotten cool Robocop tech, if ever.
Sure.
Maybe.
Marginally, and even a lot of those are from new technology
That's true, but it's still just because of technology and has nothing to do with "evolutionary warrior ability" or whatever. This is even true of older tech that has been around for a long while. Like I've said elsewhere if you're up against a lion would you rather be an unarmed man or a woman with a loaded full auto rifle and firearms training? It's already been equalizing to some degree thanks to tech.
And then on top of that, would you rather go up against the lion with a rifle or with a tank? How about with a fighter jet? Or a drone thousands of miles away? The lion is an even more "evolved to be a warrior" physical fighter than us humans, and yet it doesn't even have a chance. Technology does not just equalize our biology, it has already surpassed it decades if not centuries ago.
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