The US Navy has launched the first full fighter-sized robot plane from an aircraft carrier. Those of us who think growth in technology is linear rather than exponential often make the mistake of thinking this is no big deal because it hasn’t landed on a carrier yet. My prediction is they’ll have planes like this landing on carriers in fairly short time… and that by the end of this decade (which is only 6.5 years away) we’ll not only have them taking off and landing from carriers, but we’ll also be beginning to discuss publicly when and how to begin phasing out human pilots for most purposes. (Well, some people already are, I just mean that’s when the general public will become aware that it’s seriously under consideration.)
The thought of fighters, not to mention bombers, doing combat at accelerations and rolls and speeds that would kill a human in the cockpit is a little frightening–a machine can handle 20, 30, 50 Gs easily I would guess. But it also looks pretty inevitable now, and I don’t just mean “within my lifetime,” I mean within the next decade or so.
By the way, at this point I’m also calling mid-2020s (I’d say 2026 at the latest) before we begin openly contemplating making self-driving cars pretty much mandatory and openly questioning whether we should even allow people without special needs and training to drive themselves. To be clear, that’s when the discussions will begin in earnest.
Technological growth is rarely linear. That’s worth remembering.
Dean Esmay is the author of Methuselah’s Daughter. He has contributed to Dean’s World, Huffington Post, A Voice for Men, Pajamas Media. Neither left nor right wing, neither libertarian nor socialist.