by Mike Gray        

We’ve already discussed the move on the part of the military to entrust more and more weapons systems to on-board computers without a human being in “the loop” somewhere. According to Yahoo News:         

The U.S. Navy has admitted that it lost control of a helicopter drone during a test flight in Maryland earlier this month, leaving it to fly unguided for more than 30 minutes and 23 miles and violating Washington’s restricted airspace. The drone’s operators eventually regained control and got the drone safely back to base. The Navy tells the New York Times that a “software issue” caused the snafu.         

The drone, a Northrop Grumman MQ-8B Navy Fire Scout, is supposed to have a failsafe system that directs it to land safely if it loses its communication link with the controller on the ground. That obviously didn’t happen on the drone’s Aug. 2 flight, and it made a beeline from Naval Air Station Patuxent River in southern Maryland, where it was being tested, toward Washington. It was roughly 40 miles from the capital before the Navy regained control.         

One can reasonably expect failures from time to time, but a furrowed brow would be justifiable should something like this happen to a hardware system carrying weapons equipped with the software to deliver them.         

Is a “failsafe system” even achievable?    

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Fail Safe (film) on Amazon.com.         

Dark Star (film) on Amazon.com.         

Colossus: The Forbin Project (film) on Amazon.com.