DARPA's recent RFI on low-resource computing rethinks computation under battlefield conditions: scarce power, unreliable components, limited communications, cramped physical space and little opportunity for maintenance. Welcome to the burgeoning world of the sensor, drone, robotic scout and autonomous battlefield node.
This resembles the constraints that shape biological evolution. Living systems operate under severe energy budgets. Their components are noisy and failure-prone. They rely on local decision-making, tolerate damage, and continue functioning despite incomplete information; resilience matters more than perfection.
Future military systems will exhibit characteristics familiar in nature: distributed intelligence, local sensing and action, redundancy, graceful degradation and adaptation to specialised roles. An unattended sensor, a reconnaissance drone and a robotic logistics vehicle will look like different species occupying different ecological niches.
Natural selection optimises for survival and reproduction while military systems must remain understandable, controllable and trustworthy to their human operators. But it's going to be an SF jungle out there - it already is.
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