Northrop Grumman X-47 UCAS-D: Not A Concept Anymore

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 29 of November , 2007 at 4:35 am

X-47

Back in August, the Pentagon chose Northrop Grumman’s X-47 UCAV for a major airforce contract, pretty much killing off Boeing’s X-45 drone program. It’s not even December yet, and already Northrop Grumman has a “100% structurally complete” X-47 UCAS-D (that would be, Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator). All that’s left to do before it’s ready to go is subsystems installation, lots and lots of testing, and figuring out how to get it to land and take off on an aircraft carrier. Huh, looks easy enough in the video…

[ X-47B UCAS ] VIA [ Danger Room ]

Category: Military

1 Comment

Comment by Jaime

Made Thursday, 29 of November , 2007 at 8:13 pm

I have seen this video (cgi for most of it) from their website. Flying, landing, driving and all this pretty “basic” function are ok, now let’s talk about what really matters is to say moral decisions, say dropping a bomb as seen on TV…There is no way to pass the line of conscientiously (for whatever it means) allow death decisions to artificial entities without bringing up the controversial question about legal right and bounds linking humanity to such beings. We might be able to keep those fact hidden or unspoken for a while, but as it happens with cloning we can foresee a unprecedented debate. It is quite strange to see the concept of A-Life making his way from computer-science to robotics to consumer electronics without a deep reflexion within our society. In the end I guess nobody really care except maybe few isolated and marginalized human beings. I will end quoting though Magician, not computer wizard, my imaginary friend aka Gandalf: Who’s the fool? The fool or the fool following him?

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