The Army Wants Autonomous Aviation Tech. But Do Pilots Trust It?

By Matthew Cox

U.S. Army leaders are looking to autonomous technology to be the game-changer on the future battlefield, but experts are wrestling with how the service will convince aviators and leaders to trust machines to help them make life-or-death decisions in a split second.

Part of the Army's new modernization effort involves manned-unmanned teaming, a concept that will rely on unmanned, autonomous aircraft and ground vehicles working, in some cases, as forward scouts to identify and select targets much quicker than humans can.

Army leaders have stressed that there will always be a "human in the loop" to prevent misjudgements that could result in unintended casualties. But aviators and leaders are still reluctant to trust machines to think for themselves.

"Trust in autonomy is going to be a challenge as we move forward; there is a huge psychological component to it," Patrick Mason, deputy for the Army's Program Executive Office Aviation, told an audience Wednesday at the Association of the United States Army's Aviation Hot Topic event.

Col. Thomas von Eschenbach, director of the Capability Development and Integration Directorate at the Army's Aviation Center of Excellence, has been running simulations to experiment on how autonomy and artificial intelligence can make aviators more effective.

"When you add autonomy and you add AI ... you quicken the pace of decisions," von Eschenbach said. "We don't want to take things away from a human; we want to want to enable humans to be faster [and] more agile, and make the decisions inside somebody else's decision cycle.

Full article: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/09/06/army-wants-autonomous-aviation-tech-do-pilots-trust-it.html