The Emerging Nexus Between Special Operations and Autonomous Systems: Insights and Reflections - Maj. Gen Jeff Sengelman (ret.) and Professor Ron Arkin (Georgia Institute of Technology)

QUT Institute for Future Environments

IFE Distinguished Visitor Lecture, recorded 9 May 2018 at QUT.

Unfortunately, warfare and conflict in their many forms seem destined to blight our world for the foreseeable future. While war continues to be fundamentally a human endeavour whose character remains largely unchanged, the nature of contemporary and future conflict is undergoing significant changes.

Speaking from direct and extensive experience, Major General Jeff Sengelman (retired), as a former commander of Special Operations Australia, will reflect on high-performance special forces teams and the attributes that have made them so globally successful under the most extreme conditions and circumstances. From this, he will more widely discuss how autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, and the technologies that underpin them, are likely to impact fundamentally on current cultural, military, societal, ethical and legal approaches to conflict and warfare.

Ronald C. Arkin is Regents' Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and is the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory. He served as STINT visiting Professor at KTH in Stockholm, Sabbatical Chair at the Sony IDL in Tokyo, member of the Robotics and AI Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse, and recently completed a year’s leave at QUT and CSIRO.